Tuesday, January 19, 2010

How The Recession Will Impact Cabin Crew Jobs In 2010

The recession has severely crippled the airline industry from all angles. As a result, flights have grown cheaper and cheaper, with the in-flight freebies - cotton, candy, water bottles, food etc - being cut off brutally, and the space inside aircrafts seeming to grow smaller and smaller.

Employees in the airlines felt the pinch even harder. As profits spiralled, so did salaries. Layoffs became a matter of chilling regularity.

Thankfully, all this is expected to change in 2010. Prognosis looks good, as the recession has showed signs of slowing down and even reversing over the last quarter of 2009. The matter at hand is - how is this going to impact cabin crew jobs?

Cabin crew jobs require highly specialised and niche training, which also effectively puts candidates out of the reckoning for other jobs. Therefore, training oneself for a cabin crew job means investing in a course that will lead to only one job, and one that is gruelling, mechanical and monotonous.

Yet, of course, people continue to apply for cabin crew jobs - to the tune of 9000 applications for a single cabin crew job advertised in late 2009. Some people do it because they want quick money for a few years, others do it because they want to travel while they are young, and during the recession people have been doing it because they need a job - period.

The good news is that the end of the recession has signalled the launch of multiple new low-cost airlines. While the recent shakeups in the industry have "freed" a lot of people from their jobs, these new airlines are generating new jobs at an extremely fast rate.

The real question is this - will these new low-cost airlines want to re-employ older and experienced people, or will they try to invest in young, newly trained staff who will potentially stay with them longer? As far as current trends have been charted, the new airlines have kept their focus to young recruits, in the 21-25 age bracket.

With demand for jobs skyrocketing, it is getting more and more advisable to take up a certificate course in cabin crew training. These courses are usually quite short in duration, between six months and a year at the most. Many companies offering cabin crew training also have tie-ups with airlines, which automatically gives their candidates an edge over others in this job market.

In addition, college or university education - even when incomplete - also gets candidates preference. A full bachelor's degree can also put a flight attendant in contention for managerial or administrative positions later on. Some people even do an MBA or a post-graduate degree after a few years of working as a flight attendant, to re-enter the aviation industry in a more senior capacity later on. Customer service experience is also highly valued.

The aviation industry is expected to see steady revival in this decade, after the terrible events of 9/11 and the recession, which had shocked people into avoiding air travel through the past decade. Applicants for cabin crew jobs now can definitely expect to see results.

Monday, January 18, 2010

10 Tips To Remember When Applying For A Call Centre Vacancy

With the dotcom boom of the past decade, call centres
have become buzzing hives of activity in almost every industry. From bookings to customer support and sales management, everything that does not necessitate in-person contact is being outsourced to call centres.

This has led many of today's youth to apply for call centre jobs - whether as part-time work to earn pocket money in college days, or for full-time sustenance.

While applying to a call centre job, here are some tips that one should keep in mind:

1. At home or in office? There are a number of at-home call centre jobs available, and for no sign-up fees whatsoever. You can work full-time or part-time, but you may have to submit to an in-person background check or occasional reporting to meetings at the company's office.

2. Have excellent listening skills. Train yourself to listen - to people with different ways of speaking, to people who stammer, to people who don't want to see reason, and to people with less-than-fluent language. This is the first prerequisite for a call centre job.

3. Look online. As a lot of call centre jobs are location-independent or offshore, they are usually advertised online rather than by word-of-mouth or the local papers.

4. Apply to call centres in areas of your own expertise. Nothing can substitute learning gained by experience. If you are deeply familiar with a subject thanks to schooling or simply exploring it as a hobby, choose that area to apply to. For example, someone interested in cars could apply to a car company's customer support call centre.

5. Office hours. Night shifts are not always safe or feasible for everyone, so do not apply for night-shift-only jobs if this is the case for you. Even at home, fix your hours - do not bite off more than you can chew.

6. Look at organisations' pages, not just job portals. Keep track of the organisations who typically hire at-home or in-office call centre workers. They will probably advertise on their own pages a precious few hours or days before putting up the same job on a portal.

7. At the interview, stay focused. A lot of young people go into call centre jobs for a quick buck. This attitude seeps into their manner at the interview too. DO NOT let this happen to you - stay serious, stay focused, and show that you are dedicated to the job you are applying for.

8. Get some experience in customer service. Most of us have had at least some experience in customer service. This could be at the neighbourhood fair, volunteering at school events, or during a brief internship. You can put this to good use in your call centre job.

9. What makes good customer service? Evaluate what you would do to give good customer service to people accessing your call centre, as your interview panel is very likely to ask you this question.

10. Make the best of what you have. Experience and training, in curricular and co-curricular fields, will all come to use when you place your job application. Get your resume professionally written, to present the talents you have in the best way to get a call centre job.

Even if the job is just for your pocket money, apply for it with speed and sincerity - call centre vacancies never stay long!

How To Find A Career In Airport Recruitment In 2010

Finding a job is quite a tough ask. But what about finding a job that puts you on the other side of the interview panel?

That is what you are seeking to do when you look for a career in airport recruitment.

2010 is a year when a large number of people will be absorbed - or reabsorbed - into the airlines industry. With the recession, travel - both for recreation and business purposes - was at an all-time low, and these levels are finally rising as the global economy makes a return to normal. This is why recruitment officers and agencies are in high demand at the moment.

Airports require an extremely large set of personnel, especially for busy airports in metropolitan cities. People are required to

? help clean and maintain both the aircraft and airport,

? ensure that check-ins are made on time,

? transport and tag materials such as luggage and trolleys,

? answer the queries of passengers,

? perform security checks,

? Man the control tower

... And to perform a large number of miscellaneous tasks, ranging from unskilled labour to highly skilled.

Typically, airlines tend to outsource their recruitments to recruitment agencies. The bulk of recruitment agencies are run by entrepreneurs who set these up themselves. As a result, the best way to find a career in the field of recruitment is to set up one's own agency or to find new entrepreneurs looking for staff for their agencies. These jobs can be found through the usual avenues - local papers, networking with business professionals, using social media, and occasionally job portals. Note, though, that you will see very few job portals advertising openly for recruitment personnel - you will have to dig a little deeper to find these jobs.

To work in the recruitment sector, a specific set of skills is necessary. For example:

? Public relations. To work effectively with both the employing agencies and the hopeful employees, one must be able to communicate well and generate positive responses.

? Psychology. Working with human resources requires the ability - whether innate or learned - to evaluate them. If this sounds somewhat inhuman, let me put it this way - you need to know what jobs your candidate will be suited to in order to give them the best.

? Knowledge about the sector you are working in. In order to recommend jobs, you need to know exactly what the requirements - written and unwritten - are. In case a candidate applies for one job but is actually suited for another, the recruitment officer should be able to make suggestions.

Another feature of airport recruitment agencies is that a single airport usually trusts a single agency or a very small number of agencies to deal with its entire recruitment process, for all posts ranging from janitor to airport manager. If you can place yourself with an agency working with a large and busy airport, you will definitely find yourself some very lucrative deals before long. The profits are growing even faster in 2010 because more and more people have decided to invest in airline stocks.

Strike while the iron stays hot!

All You Need To Know About Logistic Transport Jobs

Logistics
is the area which deals with the transport and flow of resources from starting point to end point. "Resources" includes practically everything you could think of - people, goods, information, energy... what's left?

In order to manage the flow of resources from one end to another smoothly and punctually, a huge number of people is required. This is even more true in the case of physical materials, which need to be transported carefully and with maximum efficiency from the producer/manufacturer to the consumer.

Some of the tasks involved in the field of logistics are:

◦ Transportation

◦ Inventory

◦ Storage(warehousing)

◦ Handling and packaging of material

◦ Managing and integrating information

◦ Customer service(in the case of passenger transport)

To perform these tasks, a high amount of labor is required, though this has been much reduced as the processes get mechanised. Still, a large number of jobs are available, such as :

▪ Drivers and pilots - for trucks, freight trains, delivery vans, ships, airplanes etc

▪ Supply or fleet chain managers

▪ Import or export division managers

▪ Loading and unloading, packaging material

▪ Customer service personnel to answer people's queries, book reservations, handle administrative glitches and interact with the public

▪ Officials to take care of health, safety and maintenance

▪ Navigators - especially required for ships and aircraft

Jobs in the logistics and transport sector are available for people with all levels of educational qualifications. While jobs for unskilled workers get filled up as soon as they appear, there is a shortage of skilled workers in this sector, especially in the United Kingdom. People with GCSEs or A-levels may also be eligible for apprenticeships, which hold a fair amount of value in the market.

Graduate training schemes are also available in logistics and related fields, so entering these after obtaining a job will make you eligible for faster promotions and more pay.

Working in the transport and logistics sector, you can expect a great deal of variety in your work. You may have to travel all across the city, country or even the world, especially in managerial posts.

Your shifts, too, may be short or long, and may be scheduled at any time, from early morning to midday to evening to night. This is especially true in freight transport and air travel sectors, as freight is transported by night and aircrafts continue to ply all day and all night.

Logistics and transport jobs are available with employers of all shapes and sizes. From the local hardware store that needs its wood transported to the multinational company that requires an import division manager, you never know who will have a vacancy and at what level. This is an optimal time to apply for jobs, as the end of the recession is seeing many new companies being set up, all with new needs and needing new personnel.

Keep an eye on the local papers and local markets, stay subscribed to the online job boards, and you will find yourself a job before long.