I really must log-on more often. How could I have missed the start of this thread on one of my favorite topics!
Go for 5, Get 3:
> I'm afraid I have to disagree with that statement about it being
> a numbers game at ATTSC (CATC). There are tens of students
> on holdover at the moment, some on six months holdover, to
> enable them to get on to a course. They have not been
> chopped to provide the correct numbers!
They're only holding because NATS decided to take on a load more students (to make up the huge projected shortfall in controllers) and then found out that they couldn't do the shift thing at the college! The poor people haven't even had a chance to get chopped yet!
And on your next point - there has always been a "there's 16 places on the next module and we have 19 good people on this one" problem.
The consolidation idea is laudable and it's about time it happened. There are many people who have started off wobbly and turned out to be very good controllers, just as there are some who started off well and have made very bad controllers or failed (but the more worrying ones are those who started off badly, continued badly, and are still valid!)
And, yes, there are those who flew through the selection stuff and are not suitable for the job (they normally get promted very quickly
)
However on my course (not counting re-course bods), which was perceived as being a "good" course (as there weren't too many "wasters" on it!), out of the 23 people who started the fail to make it/stay with NATS rate was as follows:
Left the college: 1
Chopped: 6
Chopped but
valid elsewhere: 3
Valid/Expected to
validate but left
to work elseswhere: 2
Still training: 2
Valid: 9
I.E. A 60% failure rate. Even if you count the two still training as eventually validating it's still only 50/50. Any other training institution that had a 50% failure rate would probably have been closed down by now!
One of the people who left went to work for one of those big commercial flying outfits. Their pass rate was about 95%. Now I know they're only flying one aluminium tube and we're controlling lots of them, but that has to say somethhing about their training/ training culture. (Bearing in mind, going back to the bookwork bit, that they have to learn a lot more technical stuff than we controllers do.)
And why are NATS throwing money away buy chopping people who subsequently go on to pass the same SRG validations as NATS controllers do, but who are working for other companies? In the current financial climate is this wise?