Indian sky turns hot for job seekers; cabin crew training academies lose their sheen

If all goes well, the Indian aviation market will see a major boom in the cabin crew recruitment soon. According to news report by The Economic Times, IndiGo and Jet Airways would be hiring more than 1000 cabin crews over the next one year. State run Air India and Spicejet might be recruiting some 800 and 100 people on board soon. In an interview, Go Air CEO Wolfgang Prock Schauer said they are inducting 50 cabin crews every month. Tata Sons' ventures, AirAsia India and Vistara would recruit at least 300 cabin crew members between them over the next one year.

The growth rate in the Indian sky has been too quick. As the domestic air traffic rose by 18% last year as compared to 2014, according to International Air Transport Association, the Indian market is outpacing the world in demand growth.

As the airlines increase their fleet size enormously, Airbus has said it will deliver one plane every week to Indian carriers for the next ten years.

As more flights gets inducted to service every other day and the destinations keep on increasing at a breakneck speed, the airlines are in need of more and more cabin crews. Gone are the days when these airlines had to worry for filling up the seats. Most flights in the metro routes are overbooked even on the lean months. Moreover the strategy of the budget airlines to let people fly at nominal rates is proving a major success.

Job Market in the sky
While the rosy picture of airline jobs are keeping the job market healthy, one of the major need for the recruitments is because of a high attrition rate. Pilots are the major churn in the industry. IndiGo had hired 1200 pilots last year of which 900 were net additions and rest were replacements.

While last few years had seen mushrooming of airline training academies in the metros and suburbs across the country, there has been a prominent shift in the cabin crew recruitment process.
Summi Sharma, vice president of corporate learning at IndiGo told the Economic Times, the number of freshers - high school graduates - as a chunk of total cabin crew recruits has steadily increased in the past few years.

"We get applicants from various walks of life. We get call-centre employees, hotel executives and even nurses and lawyers and teachers and national level sportspersons," she told the financial daily.


"The training such institutes impart is extremely generic," said Kamal Hingorani, head of in-flight services and customer experience at SpiceJet told the ET. "They are taught for the hospitality industry as well as for airlines: things like how to serve meals in proper order, etc. There is no training imparted which is specific to regulatory mandates on how an airline should be operated. Also different airlines have different operations manuals and styles. And what we are primarily looking at is the basic attitude to provide service."

While a major chunk of cabin crews at Spicejet used to be sourced from the institutes, now the on-campus placements contribute only 10%.

"No matter which institute a new recruit comes from or for that matter how many years of flying experience a candidate comes with, we invest 99-100 days of rigorous training for them all to turn them into IndiGo cabin crew," said Sharma from IndiGo.

Smaller cities flying high
One of the major aspect of the recruitment in cabin crew these days are people from small cities of India joining to fly high. The credit for this shift can be attributed to higher awareness, openness, encouragement and family support for women to choose this career option. There is a major scope of personal development in this profession. Not everyone retires as a cabin crew from the airlines. As many as 5 former cabin crews are now pilots with IndiGo. Also these crews tend to join HR and other management positions in the airlines itself after a few years.