As the aviation industry begins to recover from COVID and the industry quickly approaches its former state from 2019, the topic of the global pilot shortage has once again begun circulating news headlines.
When the pilot shortage began, air carriers and airlines began to rethink hiring guidelines. Though the idea of a qualified pilot would previously stem from the total number of flight hours they accumulate, with the rise of integrated university flight school programs, the quality of training has begun to play a much bigger role in pilot hiring. This has opened a whole new realm for low-hour pilots in university programs, with new programs such as Sunwing’s Cadet program, Jazz’s Pathways Program, and Wasaya’s Entry Level Pilot Program being introduced recently.
As passenger numbers continue to increase, the need for pilots has risen once again, and these unique programs have made a return. As a fourth-year Aviation student at the University of Waterloo, I have found myself putting together my application to these programs. Since the Aviation undergraduate program is a regular stream (does not include co-op opportunities) program with limited access to pilot-specific career resources, students like myself, started looking for more direction on how to transition from a student pilot to a professional pilot. Applying for pilot positions is quite different from applying to most other jobs. Students, myself included, didn't quite know what to do. A few of the contacts I reached out to took notice of this issue.
Jessalyn Teed, a Multi Crew Coordination Instructor, and a First Officer (FO) at Sunwing Airlines, approached Tyler Jing, President, University of Waterloo Aviation Society (UWAS), a student-run group, and me (as one of the UWAS executives) to pitch an event to help prepare young student pilots to begin careers as professional pilots.
Tyler and I jumped at the opportunity to plan and lead the proposed event, which we quickly named ‘Professional Development Day’. We realized that it was the puzzle piece within our aviation training to which we were missing. We both felt strongly that aviation students of all stages of training would benefit from an event such as this to help provide the skills and knowledge we need as we begin our careers.
Planning a new event from the ground up as a student society is always challenging. We decided to bring in notable UW alumni and career advisors from the Centre for Career Action (CCA), as well as a few of Jessalyn's own connections at Sunwing to participate in the event. The professional event entailed a full day of relevant workshops, speakers, and most notably, realistic mock interviews for upper-year Aviation students. Workshops included preparing a professional portfolio, preparing for interviews, leadership skills, business etiquette, harassment response and prevention, and more.
We were delighted to have an overwhelmingly positive response from our student body. While this was incredible news for us, many more students were interested in the event than originally anticipated. To add to the challenge, a major ice storm meant that three alumni were no longer be able to attend. We worked with Jessalyn to find incredible alumni on short notice to take on the roles of mock interviewers.
Mock interviews were conducted in a ‘Multiple Mini Interview’ format, where each student attended three consecutive 10-minute interviews with three different interviewers. It was an amazing learning experience, which I am confident will be very helpful for our students. I am very thankful to all our alumni and guests who took the time out of their day to conduct over 20 interviews each. The effort and teamwork demonstrated by everyone involved cannot be understated.
In classic fashion when running any event - no amount of planning is going to prevent the last-minute stress and planning. Thanks to Jessalyn, Tyler, our guests and the UWAS team, the inaugural event was a success. We received fantastic feedback from both our guests and our attendees. Planning and running this event completely from scratch took an incredible amount of work, and despite all the challenges, I am so happy to see that the event was recognised as a resounding success.
I am extremely proud of the work everyone put in and the result was a great Professional Development Day. My classmates and I all want to see each other succeed in our professional lives, and I am proud to have played a role which helped push my classmates to success. I look forward to seeing this event expand and improve in the future. As we are now just two months from graduation, I am confident my classmates will be able to make this transition with confidence and great success, and I cannot wait to see what endeavours await us in the future.