Hahaha, well you seem to be very much like me. Well, taking into account that I had been through about 4 months of military groundschool over the previous few years, and have a degre in hard science so am numerate, I did around an hour or so a night, usually consolidation on the day's work. More work of course towards the exams. I ended up with a 90% average, including the 73% in law
. Passed that on the resit, to finish within the usual 6 months.
Now I don't advocate that regime for all students. You must make sure you keep up with the lessons, and know and understand the material covered, but there is no need to flog it to death.
No plans for integrated here, and to be honest I can't see it happening. There is no benefit to the student (in fact the course leaves graduates with
fewer hours), and it costs a lot more to run, costs that are passed on to the student. If our students want to work full-time, they are welcome to start here as early as PPL, go through our structured hour building and our groundschool onto CPL and IR without a break. This is our deliberate policy of a course that feels integrated but at the cost of modular training. Most modular schools will arrange such a course for you or help you to arrange it yourself. It is a common way of training, and in fact how I achieved my fATPL at SFT.
The advantage is flexibility, including choice of what to do when, and the choice to change FTOs in the middle, if you are not satisfied or find better value elsewhere.
Employment situation is definitely improving. Not long ago all ads and all jobs I heard about asked for "with type rating and x hours on type". Then it was "with type rating", now often "x hours minimum (usually 1000 or 1500)". When the war ends we may see further improvements.