NATS postings: any discretion over postings?
 

I've read a few posts on here stating that NATS ATCO trainees have zero choice over where they will be posted, except in exceptional (compassionate) circumstances.
So... realistically, what would be the likelihood of a 35yo female trainee being posted far from home if she had a 5 yr old child at school in the south and a pilot husband based at LGW? Might this be considered exceptional circumstances, or is it more likely to be grounds for rejection early on in the application process?
Any insight gratefully received.

You sign a contract saying you will work anyway, if you can not accept that do not sign it.

Nobody apart from the people dealing with postings know exactly how they decide on them, but there are no gaurantees. For example, as I've understood it, if Gatwick does not want/need a trainee you will not be posted there and that is the end of the story. You might be posted somewhere close (such as City or Heathrow) but you might also be posted to Aberdeen.

And this is all presuming you end up training for Aerodrome and not area, which is the same story again.

You get to hand in a preference, but there are no gaurantees.

You can make your case to the course manager at the college and he'll decide which stream to put you in ie aerodrome or area. The last basic course had a similar case and she got want she wanted so as long as you have a good case then they'll listen. As for postings after that, that is need dependant from the airfields themselves.

Thanks 1985, very helpful. Does this mean she requested Area (since I imagine that this results in less likelihood of being posted to the other end of the country - am I correct to assume that most following this path end up in either Swanwick or Prestwick?) We need to live within an hour of LGW, which means any of the southern bases would work, but not sure how we'd cope with, say, a posting to Aberdeen, especially as I know one controller who said it took him 10 years before he was able to switch to a new aerodrome!

Popgun87,
Going on Area doesn't mean Aberdeen is off the list.There are quite a few there who failed to validate at Swanwick,got a choice of Aberdeen or the chop.It has some low level enroute sectors for the offshore helis.
It will take a long time to get posted out of Aberdeen on the aerodrome side.
PS ABZ is an hour away from LGW,via Easyjet.

Assuming you're an above-average student (which I obviously would be - haha!) then how likely would an Aberdeen posting be? I realise nothing is guaranteed, but it would be nice to think that there is at least a 60% chance that I'd stay south of Manchester... I'm definitely applying in any case, and will cross such issues if and when they arise. Just trying to go into it with my eyes fully open.

And yes, aware of flight times, and certainly have nothing against Scotland (I'm from Edinburgh!) More about trying to minimise the time I'd be away from my children (flight time may only be one hour, but factor in getting to/from the airport, check-in etc and it becomes nearer 4 hrs).

Popgun 87,
It depends on where the needs are at the time.All I can say is ABZ is a bigger unit than you think,and has a permanent escape committee. So they need replacements like everywhere else.Nats postings have always been like my pprune name.Throwing a dice because even with requests it could be anywhwere.
Good luck.

I truly feel for the 5yr old......

Heathrow Director, I can assure you that my 5 year old (who won't stay 5 forever!) will always come first. Her dad is quite a senior pilot with a very good airline and is home a lot. The way I see it, a career in ATC is far more compatible with my husband's career (and family life in general) than my career prior to having children, which involved very long hours Mon-Fri, and invariably saw me leaving the house at 7am and not returning until very late.
I would certainly not choose to be posted too far from home, but at the same time, don't want to pass up the opportunity to do a job that I think I would be good at and enjoy (and one that will hopefully enable me to spend plenty of quality time with my kids while still managing to pay the school fees!)

Incidentally, we haven't ruled out the possibility of relocating the whole family and buying a small flat near Gatwick for my husband to stay in before early flights and on standby days...

Popgun87
 

You've seen some good advice already on previous replies. It sounds like you're beginning to answer your own questions as you go. Best advice I can give would be to concentrate on the application process and if successful, give everything to passing the relevant ATC course. Everything else will fall into place after that. I know it will be hard, but try not to let the family/relationship side distract you during the process. One step at a time!:)

Thanks Tak, and yes, you're absolutely right on all counts! Writing it down (and responding to HD's rather flippant remark!) has helped me sort things in my own head. Any advice on things I can do / read / say to help me get through the whole recruitment process (aside from practising my mental arithmetic and cube diagrams etc) very much appreciated!

You get a choice of posting but business demand comes first, having a kid or a husband doesn't count as compassionate grounds for a posting, it counts for nothing. To be honest, at 35 and with children, it's gonna be an uphill battle getting through selection and college so I would just concentrate on that, you can figure out locations if/when you reach that stage. Best of luck

Don't make the mistake of assuming that Aberdeen is a sleepy hollow or an easy posting. From my limited experience I would say that their radar sectors are amongst the most complicated in the UK.

That remark was simply meant as an innocent (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) follow-up to Throw a Dyce's comment about people who failed to validate at Swanwick being offered "Aberdeen or the chop" and I certainly didn't mean to offend anyone who has been posted there!

Not a problem, just correcting the stereotype :ok:

Also, check your PMs

Statistically speaking, if you get on an Area course you will more than likely (70%?) get posted to Swanwick (either AC or TC).

If you get Airports/Approach, you still stand a good chance of being posted to somewhere in the South but less so than an Area student.

Unfortunately....also statistically.....not many 35 year old ab initio's make it. But don't let that put you off, it's not impossible.

Is there really any call for that?

Popgun87, back when my course were to receive postings, we were asked to give our preference. Two people specifically requested Prestwick due to having family and children up there, one person requested Manchester, one requested Belfast and a few requested London airports.

The person who requested Belfast was posted to Heathrow tower. One of those who requested a London airport was sent to Belfast. The two who requested Prestwick were posted to West Drayton and the person who requested Manchester was sent to Swanwick. The postings to Manchester and Prestwick came from the pool of people who had requested West Drayton or Swanwick.

On the face of it, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever but it must have made sense to someone.

As a previous poster has mentioned, given your age and circumstances, training and validating will be an uphill struggle with a very high chance of failure. You will need to go in with an open mind as to where you are posted because, ultimately, an undesirable posting could be a blessing in disguise when it comes to validating successfully.

Good luck :)

One of my watch supervisors had a saying:-
'One volunteer is worth 1000 pressed men'.
Sadly HR/personnel do not seem to understand this common sense approach.
When I was in Scotland, I met a u/t who wanted to work at Swanwick. He told me about his course-mate, from Ayr who was sent, against his wishes, to the south coast.

It's not rocket-science.

Please don't think I'm being flippant with what I'm about to say. It's meant as advice.

NATS today is a big business. The majority of big businesses in the UK generally couldn't give a t*ss about their employees preferences and happiness.

popgun87
 

Best advice for you is to leave personal baggage at the door when going for interview. There are hundreds of applicants for each place, and business needs dictate where you will end up. As for exceptional circumstances or personal preferences.......we all have those.....yours are no more important than a thousand other worthy reasons.
The best of luck to you, and if you want a long, trouble-free and very well paid job then try to remain low profile; do the best you can without moaning all the time, and realise that occasionally in life you can't have everything. Remember that in the ATC family team, any slack you get has to be taken up by someone else.

That seems unduly harsh and totally unnecessary.

Just to flip the coin. I managed to successfully validate at the age of 35 with a wife and young children in tow, so it's far from impossible. :ok:

There are a lot of people on here who are no longer current and, in reality, have no idea of what the training is like these days. In their times you had to know everything about everything in order to pass - it's not like that now as someone finally realised that time spent memorising irrelevant crap is wasted. Plenty of people have done it while married with kids, I know several personally. If you want it, you can do it.

Also, there are people on here who over-estimate the amount of work required to be successful at college and I think some of those fall into the "won't somebody think of the children" camp here. Raise your children how you think best; don't listen to the armchair experts on teh internets. My wife and I both have full-time jobs and our kids spend time with their grandparents and in nursery while we are both at work. This, I think, is good for them both educationally and socially.

ATC is actually a brilliant career for those with kids, there's plenty of time off and I get to spend much more time with my family than I would if I was stuck in the 9-5 grind.

reportyourlevel
 

Well said buddy.....top respect. [I'm still current by the way.] As I touched on earlier....leave the outside issues at the door when you come to work; the only relevant factor is "can you do the job, yes or no?" And when you are at work I'm not really interested in personal matters that reflect lifestyle choice....it is none of my business.....it only becomes my business if I am expected to pick up extra load as a result of bias.

NATS postings: any discretion over postings?
 

Brian, you say one parent MUST be the homemaker! Who are you to comment on a family you don't even know and judge what's best for their child. Presuming your daughter is this "homemaker" what does she do between 9 and 3.30 everyday while your grandkids are at school? She could have had a mentally stimulating and rewarding morning shift in that time. My wife has ambitions outside of raising kids, does this make her a terrible and selfish mother when I have a well paid career too? She is trying to be a role model to our daughter as well as an amazing mum. Shift work is brilliant for raising kids. And as has been said already, a lot of you are a bit out of touch, the college have started taking into account where people would like to be posted. A happy trainee will be more successful than a bitter and resentful one the wrong end of the country.

As a student who has recently been posted (yes, to Aberdeen of all places) I can say that there doesn't appear to be a great amount of personal preference taken into account. I requested Farnborough and instead two others who did not were sent there. In these circumstances I think it's important to keep in mind that NATS can and will send you where they wish and it's a risk associated with a fantastic career.

I can only fault the distance from my friends and loved ones involved with me being at this unit, all my colleagues and managers here are friendly, approachable and engaging. However it is a distance that I am not prepared to live with forever, how I resolve that problem remains to be seen!

Bad Parent
 

I think I am in the bad parent camp, I passed the college, I validated and, yes woest me, coped with the pittance of a wage, all with three children. I'd gladly take your set of cards to start the college!

In terms of postings, it's empathically emphasised from the first interview that you'll go anyway so NATS really will hammer the life out of the "permission slip" they make you read and sign to acknowledge you understand this. Personal preferance will be given lip-service but i very much doubt any more than this.

From a personal view, I was happy to take anything they offered just as long as I had a job!

PS no child is in counselling

Svix,
good luck at EGPD.
It's strange that the distances that you and your Farnborough based course-mates are now forced to travel to see your loved-ones, seems totally-at-odds with one of the aims of the NATS Corporate Responsibility Document, namely to reduce the CO2 footprint from staff commuting.
Good to hear what low-levelowl says though.

It's very easy to say that when you come from a generation that was able to buy a nice house in a respectable location for 3 x annual salary and then surf the repeated property booms of the 1980s and 1990s up the property ladder while watching inflation eat your debt every few years. If you owned a house near LL 30 years ago then I suspect you did very nicely. It is very different for today's young families, who need two incomes to stand any chance of getting a mortgage for a shoebox on a new-build estate, or perhaps a terrace in a slightly dodgy neighbourhood, in time for their 30th birthdays. Meanwhile the nice 3-bedroom semis that were occupied by young families in times gone by are now worth £400-500k in many areas, and aspiring to owning one of those will probably entail working all the way to the future retirement age of 70+. Relying on inheritance to move up the ladder won't be any use; the kids will have grown up by then.

It sounds like your children are doing just fine but there are many families out there who simply will not make any headway at the moment without some serious help from the grandparents. If that help comes in the form of contributions to house deposits and school fees, then great, but I know many grandparents who don't wish to downsize yet and have therefore offered 'free' childcare to help their daughter / daughter-in-law back to work. Don't underestimate the strength of feeling in the younger generations about this - most are too polite to say anything like this but you can bet that many are thinking it, so I wouldn't make too much of your hands-off grandparenthood!

Good post Easy Street. In fact many of my generation are actually actively helping out our parents as they approach their senior years, if they didn't have good careers, so two earners in a household is a must.

Well said! I don't think the baby boomers realise just how good they had it

Yahoo: No, of course they won't.

I wouldn't dream about offering advice on something I didn't know about. I think you are giving poor advice, in a reasonably holier-than-thou manner, on a subject you are, at best, not fully up to date with. I appreciate why you feel the need to participate here, but please try to see that giving people career advice (and therefore potentially altering the course of their lives) based on the way it was years ago when you first started out is neither appropriate nor useful. Your defence of "my views are valid too" doesn't cut it when their basis is flawed.

I doubt many grandparents share that view, I think it's probably quite old-fashioned. Certainly among the ones I know, most are involved in caing for their grandchildren regularly. Not just to allow their children to work, but it's actually great for the grandkids too. My preschooler knows more about gardening than I ever will, because she spends lots of time helping her grandad in his garden. I think the days of an hour a week at granny's on a Sunday are gone, or at least going.

I too have dozens of friends, some with kids. Most, no, all of them have worked hard to get where they want in life. Maybe they don't HAVE to pursue a career, but WANT to. I can certainly understand that; the saisfaction I get from my career is immense.

Frankly, it doesn't bother me what you think. What does bother me is when you try to influence someone's decision with flawed advice based on outdated reasoning. If someone thinks ATC is what thy want to do then we, as a profession, are obliged to encourage them.

Edit for spelling.

Gosh, what have I started?!!
Thanks for all the comments and PMs folks.

It's ok Popgun, someone will mention deteriorating T&Cs and the pension in a minute and you'll be forgotten! :}

Good luck!

We have great T&Cs, and a great pension!

Easy Street.
Bollocks. Not if you lived in the London area at the time of galloping inflation and wage restraint.

Many of those recently retired also held part time jobs at the beginning of their careers. Others, even more motivated to get ahead, did external university degrees. Several also did part time flying jobs.
Their careers didn't just fall out of the sky, they worked for them.

Re NATS postings I remember it as being offered as a choice of primary, secondary and tertiary locations. I was advised to write the same station in every choice to have even a remote chance of getting something suitable.

NATS is an organisation with a great work force in all disciplines but the top level management both then and now has never been of the best.

I resigned and took my modest talents else where.:uhoh:

I remember being told, back in the 70's, that if you wanted posted to, for example, Aberdeen then you put down "Anywhere but Aberdeen". That would guarantee you a posting to Aberdeen!

In nats one used to be in a mobile grade and had to take postings as they came. I had at least two compulsory postings with only three weeks notice, and one with minus one weeks notice. I turned up for work after two cycles leave only to find it wasn't there any more. I wondered why the ops room was locked...

What do you mean "nowdays" we were "genuinely decent people and a pleasure to work with" 35 years ago!