Unclear TP requirements

[Captain Bradley]

Hi,

I am not related to flight testing though I have recently been reading some job listings for test pilots. What is unclear to me, requirements of some of them seem to not include any test pilot course (or it seems to not be compulsory). Here is one example:

- "Flight Test Pilot" at Bombardier

Qualifications

As our ideal candidate,

- You must have practical knowledge of flight test procedures and requirements with a minimum of 3 years of flight test experience or equivalent
- You must have a Bachelor’s Degree in an engineering discipline or equivalent OR be a graduate of an accredited test pilot school (USAF , Navy , French , Empire or National Test Pilot School)
- You must hold the appropriate US or Canadian, instrument ratings and commercial licenses
- You must have a First Class FAA medical or equivalent required
- You must have a minimum of 1500 hours including 500 hours of turbine powered flight experience as a pilot
- You must have interpersonal skills necessary to work effectively with a variety of individuals, departments and organizations
- You must have strong communication skills (written and spoken)
- You must have the ability and willingness to work with irregular hours and work days
- You must have the ability to travel on short notice
- You must hold an ATP/ATPL or attain within 6 months of hire

By reading this you can get a feeling that having aerospace engineering degree combined with some previous flight testing experience (for example light aircrafts below 2000kg MTOW) makes you ideal candidate. Does it really work like that? No need to be a graduate of a long professional TP course?

[Mad (Flt) Scientist]

I suspect it's that those are all "minimum" and it's a long list. I would guess that if you were "at minimums" on every item, you'd not be "ideal", you'd be "barely considered".

What that "OR" allows the company to do, for example, is take a quite experienced TP from another company in the same general classification of aircraft, and not worry "but he didn't graduate from TP school X", as long as he/she has an engineering degree.

It's also saying that a TPS graduate doesn't need an engineering degree. Which seems fair enough, on balance.


Bear in mind also that often it'll be a HR department or recruitment agency doing a first cut at the candidates list, to winnow it down before it gets to someone with "other things to do". The HR type person will apply this list as a bunch of "must have" minimums. So to allow the person actually doing the final selection a chance to apply a bit of judgement, there's a tendency to set them each a little low individually, so the "ideal" candidate with 1 day too little experience doesn't get binned early. (The counterbalance to that is if you set the minimums too low, HR will pass on every Tom, Dick or Jane and you'll be swamped.)


In that sense I'm reminded of the "Viz" advice when filling a vacancy: take half the CVs you receive and throw them straight in the bin, to avoid hiring unlucky people. That's a lot closer to the truth about recruitment to a large organization that many of us would like to think.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Also there are, and always have been TPs who are not long course graduates. They just tend to be people with a very large amount of equivalent experience and education - so this description is taking care not to exclude such an individual automatically, should they apply. I can't think of any such people I've ever met, born after around 1955, without an engineering or science degree however, so this is basically not excluding anybody.

G

[ICT_SLB]

The other thing to consider is that any North American company may be setting their standards very high to show to Immigration there are no suitable local candidates (and the qualifications just happen to match their foreign recruit's CV very well).
(BTW one of the best TPs I ever had the pleasure of flying with admitted in a weak moment that he did have a degree - in Forestry!).