Anyone interested in the Profession anymore?

[PaulW]

I agree with your sentiments but all three of those examples are bad. All of those professions require a period of low/no pay in the form of internship; lawyer and architect or on job training such as a PGCE in the case of a teacher.

Reality is everyone has to start somewhere but companies are taking advantage of this and it is no longer a career with a structure because if you pay you can skip a step. Those in the self improved route, instructing and air taxi jobs and then turbo props knew it was worth the short term pain because eventually you would end up on a jet and earn some money or were happy with the trade off of, lifestyle. Now you don't need to do any of that and bottom rung money is also on the jets, and the lifestyle has gone from regional work as well. There is no pay progression because of this or lifestyle progression because nobody demands it, we are all just happy to have a flying job, or are on old contracts and are all right jack. MPL making it cheaper to train will only make it worse, devaluing the qualification, / experience required not that it was much anyway.

Doctors, Lawyers and architects have to go through years of low pay and gain experience before the big money contracts come along. Unfortunately they also have people willing to pay to get the best internships in the best companies as well. But importantly they negotiate their own pay, and rely on proving their worth and not on collective bargaining negotiated by someone who may not have any personal investment in the outcome to ones pay deal. Collective bargaining is where teachers are similar to us. Now find me a teacher happy with their terms and conditions. May be we should start agreeing to performance related pay based on how efficient we are, bonuses for dealing with malfunctions and incidents, service recovery to passengers etc, how much fuel we save based on conditions agreed with a crew council. Red ringed pay for previous ratings or experience related pay based on more than just flying hours. If you've had several engine failures that you have dealt with successfully you get paid more than someone who hasn't. I'm playing devils advocate here but I think we need to get creative with the way we are paid and play the bean counters at their own game conditonsl pay rather than ask for the standard 5% pay rise.

I don't know what the answer is but being difficult to the new guys is not it. It has to come from the experienced pilots with an input to training and recruitment policy who have nothing to benefit from negotiating new contracts for new joiners but the knowledge they have looked out for and gone some way to securing a career for those younger and less experienced than them as others many years ago did for them.
I am thinking out loud if you disagree I welcome your thoughts.