Graduate Services
Experience & Hiring after the course
After receiving your pilot licenses and ratings, you will need to build flight experience. One constructive way is to obtain a Certified Flight Instructor certificate. This will allow you to use your new skills to train other pilots, which should enhance your own skills and knowledge while building your flight experience and earning some money. Other options for building single-engine flight time include flying for local radio traffic stations, small cargo operators, crop dusting operators, pipeline inspecting operators, etc. Once you have acquired a few hundred hours of flight time, you can start applying for multi-engine flying jobs.
These are more challenging to obtain because the insurance requirements on the operators are more stringent. That’s where having a good number of single-engine flight hours will be helpful. CAFS highly recommends that you network with other pilots who are one or two steps ahead of you. The single greatest way to achieve employment in aviation is through the recommendation of a pilot currently employed where you want to work. Because airlines entrust their pilot work force with expensive aircraft and the lives of their passengers, character recommendations are almost as important as flight experience. After deciding which airlines you want to apply with and obtaining these companies’ minimum requirements for employment.
Our dedicated Graduate Services team provides pre-employment support, guidance and advice to enable our graduates to gain their first professional flying role.
Our overall aim is to ensure that we provide the best possible support and assistance to our students from the moment they first consider an airline career to the time they achieve it. For our partner airlines, our focus is to ensure that they can be confident they will be recruiting a well-trained and properly prepared First Officer for type training.
Our dedicated Graduate Services team delivers post-course airline recruitment commitment for self-sponsored students, including the following activities:
- Identification and facilitation of airline employment opportunities for our Airline Pilot Career Programme graduates.
- Close liaison with airlines to create dedicated training schemes and to identify potential candidates for employment.
- Provision of post-graduation advice and support to graduates.
Forward thinking airlines also seek to fill a portion of their future pilot vacancies through pre course recruitment, wherein they work with CAFS to pre-select cadets and either mentor or sponsor them through training.
Current airline cadet programs are routinely advertised on our website with the following being the most recent announcements.