The way I see it is if someone decided to go down the self sponsored route and fund their own training they would:
- be wasting more years of their life working in jobs they do not care about to earn money to fund enormously expensive training
- Have to fund their training which will cost thousands upon thousands
- Have NO gurantee of a job at the end of having invested their thousands unless they were lucky enough to land themself a spot on a mentored pilot program (although I guess this would only really be applicable to EU wanabees as right to work is required for the EU mentored programs)
- Have a huge amount of debt to pay back and be on a crap starting salary which would only compound the problem (versus the starting salary at CX which is good!)
If this was a few years back people would have been saying the same thing, ohhh just go for the self sponsored route the market will improve. Well here we are at the moment and there is no improvement. If people decide to self sponsor it is more than likely they'll end up on the other end with the same market conditions. We're not headed for a boom anytime soon.