I seem to remember several months back flicking through a copy of Flight Magazine, every week they print a profile of a person working in aviation on the inside back cover. This particular issue contained the profile of a young lady F/O with Hangar 8, the profile stated that she had graduated from the OAA integrated course and had joined Hangar 8 as an ops assistant until a flying job came up and she moved into the F/O job, the profile did not indicate whether she emailed her CV into Hangar 8 or whether she walked from OAA and visited Hangar 8 in person or indeed whether she was well connected with current Hangar 8 pilots. But it seems that it can work and I believe that other operators do have similar schemes, I guess the ops assistant salary won’t be great but it will be better than job seekers allowance and you will at least be able to get your face in the right places and network a bit and you never know you might even enjoy it. One note of caution is that really good ops people are not easy to find and if you prove yourself to be excellent at the job the CP might want to keep you in ops and not let you move into the flightdeck, conversely if you’re useless in ops you will soon find yourself out on your ear.