Navigating Aviation Careers Beyond 2020

For those who have not experienced my confused expat Kiwi accent, you may not know that I still have strong ties to Aotearoa. When 737NG NZ pilot – let’s call him ‘E’ – recounted his transition and upward climb working for the Electoral Commission during the recent New Zealand election, I knew it was a story that required retelling. If you ever thought, all I can do is fly, this piece will encourage you to think again.

Back home now, I found myself in deep conversation with fellow dog walking friend, Matt, who is also an ICU doctor at a busy city hospital. “We have both pilots and cabin crew working in the hospital, they are amazing with patients and families,” he exclaimed. I added that if he needed any procedures updated or risks managed… pilots should be his go to – he looked excited at that prospect. I suspect hospitals are constantly quality-managing systems. Healthcare along with the ADF have been highlighted as long-term future-proof career options; silver lining right there.

Aviation has a distinct and unique set of challenges around careers when a shutdown hits. For pilots, that comes in the form of ‘how to stay current when you are not flying’. It’s not as simple as just jumping back into the saddle. The AFAP shared with me the array of initiatives they are implementing and lobbying for, to prevent a pilot skills shortage including a new ‘Job Ready’ scheme. The ripple effect of an aviation shutdown radiates to myriad other industries such as mining and tourism, so don’t think this conversation is simply about pilot jobs. We also straddle the hot topic suggesting that the ‘pilot shortage remains an issue’.

Are we over the ‘Pandemic Online Expos’? Zoom fatigue is now coined by the urban dictionary as ‘Sore buttocks and slight throbbing of head from staring at everyone in their pajamas while participating in meeting after meeting in your dining room due to social distancing, due to COVID-19.’ I’d like to add, bedrooms seem to be the go as well. I digress. I am a holder of Zoom webinars, meetings and expos; yes, blame me. But as we evolved in our use of this medium so did the event managers and presenters, turned performers. Two who mastered the energy and audience engagement were Women In Aviation (WAI) and Women in Airports with expo themes of leadership, resilience, empowerment, collaboration and innovation – ROOAAAARRRR. Love this stuff. If there is anything we in aviation do well, it is respond to failure and crises with ideas. Dive into these pieces of inspiration before we ‘show you the money’ and head into some uber practical and essential finance reading.

Aviation financial advice specialist Richard Marsden, director of MGD Wealth, took time out to create a ‘Financial plan checklist’ and ‘Expat essentials content around tax’ specifically for aviation professionals. Stand downs, redundancies and early retirements have hit us like a raging typhoon. For me, my business of 20 years literally stopped. So even though the numbers and planning are not what inspires me day-to-day, focusing on them is critical in order to ride this out with some semblance of financial security, or at the very least a plan. I wish someone had told me much of this stuff way earlier.

Once I had dragged myself out of the depressive nature of my business bust, I realised that as a mature person I had the tools to mitigate or manage whatever life had thrown at me, my history was evidence of that. But what of our youth? A recent Year13 survey of 2,000 youth showed “80 per cent are worried it will be harder to find or maintain a job after they finish school due to the pandemic”. What of their entry into a workforce that is already strangled by a pandemic, without the maturity or experience to know that ‘this too shall pass’. And so my quandary was solved by thinking not about me but about what I could do for our young job seekers. Put simply, I got out of my own way, stopped ruminating on what no longer existed and used what I still had to move forward.

We’ve all been focusing on the impact of the last 10 months because we’ve had to. It’s time to look to the ‘future of work’, press reset and step into conversations around what we can do, with what we now have.

Kirsty Anne Ferguson – Pinstripe Solutions

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill