Post ATPL and pre my dream airline job.
 

This is my first posting so please excuse me for any errors in advance.

So I'm considering a career change. I've read Pilot, browsed a few web sites and read this forum.

I imagine that if I took the plunge, I'd go off to Florida for PPL, Night, MEP and hour building.
Then back to the UK for ATPL exams followed by CPL, IR and MCC.

But then what? It's clear that there is a gap between finishing the MCC and being attractive to airlines.

My question is: After MCC, what do people do to increase their hours, gain experience and basically get into a position where their CV isn't binned by an airline 2 seconds after reading it?

i'm doing an aviation related degree

Assuming the airlines are ignoring 200 hour fATPLs, then unless you are very rich you need someone else to pay for your hours. Probably the most common next step is to instruct (or try to - I believe the FI(R) is very popular at the moment, and there are a lot of just qualified FIs chasing few jobs), or chase any of the assorted other jobs that don't charge you money to fly ('pay you to fly' may not be true at the moment...), the classic examples are glider-towing, parachute, photography, things like that.

At around 700 hours commercial single-pilot IFR (hopefully i've got that correct..) becomes an option, and several of the instructors who did my PPL and have since reached the 1000-hour level are now moving on to work like Air Ambulance/Air taxi etc. When the airlines finally start serious recruiting again i'd expect these guys to be near the top of the pile (1000-2000 hours, with hundreds of hours multi/turbine/IFR time flying around Europe).