HI Jonathan
Congrats for even considering it in this time and it does show you are committed. Well the truth as I have seen it is this:
The flying schools I speak to are all keen to point out that there are signs of the market picking up
- no offence but you can not be that naive - of course they will say that - they have no shareholders only the customers to keep paying their wages - there will never be a downtrun for them if people keep paying. Sure there might be some signs but not in the sense we are all hoping for - more like unique cases.
If what the schools are saying is true then I would expect to see say 50% of those Graduating this month with interviews or job offers lined up as opposed to 30% in say November
That is quite frankly
BS, I can not believe they are allowed to say that. That has to be false advertising, maybe a check with trading standards is in order. I would say out of a class of ten, 1 might have something lined up at the end due to having a contact (relative) in an industry, there will always be approximately two who will never get jobs. I refer you to Scroggs and WWW who have stated this before and there will always be these people in the industry. The other seven will I reckon take between 1 year and 5 years to get any type of job at the moment. It could all pick up in a year but I reckon a year is minimum and even then I do not think it will become anything more for at least two years if not three.
What % of Graduates from the leading schools are getting flying jobs within say 6 months? I have no idea whether it's 60-70% or 10%
I would say at the present time it would have to be 10% - just look at some sponsored courses for their difficulties and then look at the self-sponsored. Probably worth searching the threads as I know the gurus WWW and scroggs have done this to death already in other posts. Worth asking others as well as there are a lot of cooks and way too many indians.
Above all:
DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THE SCHOOLS SAY REGARDING EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES AS THEY ARE IN THE DARK AS MUCH AS WE ARE. They want to see you a product and will do anything to do that. Think - if they had such good results why not produce it for all to see and let the CAA verify it. Even if they do produce results, no-one can verify it and it will not provide an accurate view. All of my friends who graduated - from the best to the worst are still looking for jobs and only one of my friends has got job thanks to the school. That was one out of about 50 people who had finished the courses.
Having said all that - do it now and then it will be ready for when it will pick up but try to keep some income coming in to offset massive loans. If you really want to do it then just do it. Beware what the schools say.