The importance of the number of retakes in ATPL Exams

[Rendy]

Hello,

I'm writing an article about the importance of the number of retakes in ATPL Exams. I would like to kindly ask commercial pilots (the ones who have been ever employed) to take a short survey on this topic (3 multiple choice questions). It takes no more than 30 seconds to answer.

Link: https://s.surveyplanet.com/P_uy031PE

Once completed, I will publish the results here.

Thank you very much!

[PilotLZ]

Done. Best of luck with your work. I would only like to suggest one point - it depends on where you are applying, whether it's a large company with hundreds of applications coming in and more of a formalised approach to recruitment involving a lot of HR, or a small operation where decisions are made over a meeting with the DFO/ Chief pilot. Outfits from the first category are more likely to set more numerical criteria for filtering out the best applicants, and those may easily involve ATPL exam average, number of retakes, IR skills test attempts etc. While I'm absolutely not saying that a large number of resits or marginal results will not make a bad impression on the decision maker in companies from the second category, the odd resit is less likely to outweigh your background, personality and performance in the interview in the decision making.

[justasmallfire]

I think you need to take other variables into account like age,pass rate of cpl/ir.My personal experience was that most of my class mates got interviews in the first few month after passing all mainly 10-15 years younger.The rest on second or more retakes took some time longer,The oldest like myself did not get any interview offers for some length of time.For a first job a company may be interested in pass rate ect for second or third job they will not even ask you your results.

[Rendy]

Done. Best of luck with your work. I would only like to suggest one point - it depends on where you are applying, whether it's a large company with hundreds of applications coming in and more of a formalised approach to recruitment involving a lot of HR, or a small operation where decisions are made over a meeting with the DFO/ Chief pilot. Outfits from the first category are more likely to set more numerical criteria for filtering out the best applicants, and those may easily involve ATPL exam average, number of retakes, IR skills test attempts etc. While I'm absolutely not saying that a large number of resits or marginal results will not make a bad impression on the decision maker in companies from the second category, the odd resit is less likely to outweigh your background, personality and performance in the interview in the decision making.

Thank you very much PilotLZ, I really appreciate your point of view and I will take it onboard my article. Thank you!

[Rendy]

I think you need to take other variables into account like age,pass rate of cpl/ir.My personal experience was that most of my class mates got interviews in the first few month after passing all mainly 10-15 years younger.The rest on second or more retakes took some time longer,The oldest like myself did not get any interview offers for some length of time.For a first job a company may be interested in pass rate ect for second or third job they will not even ask you your results.

Thank you for your reply, justasmallfire, I'm aware of that. I just wanted to have as little as possible questions, as I've done a few surveys with pilots already and it's really difficult to collect enough answers to have a sufficiently large sample to do any assumptions. I know there are many other variables that may have an impact. Anyway, the survey is asking on time to the first interview, which is meant the very first one, for the first job. It's maybe not obvious, I'm going to highlight that. Thank you.

[Sethorion]

This is a neat idea. A bloke over on modularpilot.co.uk (I'm not affiliated, it's just a good blog for modular pilots) submitted a freedom of information (FOI) request to the CAA for ATPL pass rates. The graph doesn't show retake rates but I'm sure they can be FOI'd too. Check them out here -> https://www.modularpilot.co.uk/atpl-exam-first-time-and-overall-pass-rates-2013-2018/2138

[jamestkirk]

Done. Would be interesting to see the results.

[Rendy]

This is a neat idea. A bloke over on modularpilot.co.uk (I'm not affiliated, it's just a good blog for modular pilots) submitted a freedom of information (FOI) request to the CAA for ATPL pass rates. The graph doesn't show retake rates but I'm sure they can be FOI'd too. Check them out here -> https://www.modularpilot.co.uk/atpl-exam-first-time-and-overall-pass-rates-2013-2018/2138

Thank you Sethorion, I appreciate it. I’ve already seen this page and was thinking to contact CAA as well, but they can provide data on exams itself only. I need also the number of months to the first interview for my survey, which they obviously don’t know.

[Rendy]

I took 2 years to do ATPL and 1 fail. Didn't stop me from getting an airline job.

Thanks for your input, Negan, it’s appreciated!

[Rendy]

Done. Would be interesting to see the results.

Thank you very much jamestkirk, I will be able to publish the results hopefully next week!

[Atlantic Explorer]

This is a neat idea. A bloke over on modularpilot.co.uk (I'm not affiliated, it's just a good blog for modular pilots) submitted a freedom of information (FOI) request to the CAA for ATPL pass rates. The graph doesn't show retake rates but I'm sure they can be FOI'd too. Check them out here -> https://www.modularpilot.co.uk/atpl-exam-first-time-and-overall-pass-rates-2013-2018/2138

Interesting that the overall pass rate is reducing year on year.