Dire state
The state of the civil market is dire at the moment and I can't see it improving for some time however the sooner you get the fATPL in your hot sticky little hand the better.
Once you do have the fATPL you should remember that the two bigest Lo-Co's in the UK have taken the selling of airline seats to mean they sell all the seats on the aircraft except the captains!
Both the big Lo-Co,s make a lot of money by selling the young and hopefull's of this world type ratings and line training, once the young Lady or Gent has the contracted hours under the belt the airline puts them in a hold pool, pays them only by the hour for flying and uses them as little as they can because they make more money training the next victim!
The fact that someone who is ex-RAF is most likely to be a very sharp pilot cutts no ice with the bean counters..............they can make more money from a 200 hour cadet.
Things are changing slowly because the banks are now not giving £100K loans to people for pilot training because of the number of people who are now insolvent due to the actions of the Lo-Co airlines but it will be some time before the pilot market recovers from this "pay to fly" stupidity.