“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” – Leonardo Da Vinci
Well it’s been a minute since I blogged but I promise I have a really good reason this time, because I’ve been super busy with training for my amazing new job! That’s right, your girl is now an Air Hostess!
After 2 years of indecisiveness since finishing university, I randomly applied for a job as Cabin Crew. When I say randomly I literally mean I was sitting there one night and thought it would be fun so applied right there and then. After that it all happened very quickly, and here I am having been flying for nearly a month now! I’m not going to actually name the company that I work for on here but there will be pics of me in uniform because I love it.
I’ll give a brief overview of the (very long and difficult) recruitment process as it’s something I get asked about all the time but honestly words just can’t describe how intense it was. To even apply for the job you had to do an online assessment, and if you passed then you could send off your application. After this I was invited to an assessment day, which was literally about a week after I applied so I did not have a lot of time to prepare! When you first got to the training centre the first thing they did was measure your height and if you could reach a handle on the floor whilst holding onto the door handle. Needless to say I only just made the cut as the minimum height requirement is 5 foot 2 and I’m just about 5 foot 3! Someone actually was sent home at this stage as he was too tall, as you have to be under 6 foot 2 for health and safety reasons.
The next step was an individual role play assessment followed by a group exercise. In the role play you were given a brief that you had to read aloud clearly and then the interviewer pretended to be a difficult customer to see how you dealt with it. Obviously we weren’t expected to know company policy or anything but they were assessing our customer service skills and how we would react to a difficult situation. The group exercise was to see how well you worked as a team with people you’ve just met, as on the job you work with different people every day and have to be able to work as a team regardless of whether you know the people or not. Each person was given a score for these two assessments, and then we all had to sit and wait while they called out a list of names that were taken into another room. I was not called out in the first list, and on my day the group was literally split exactly in half so I had no way of gauging whether I’d got through to the next stage or not!
Luckily I did get through and it was on to the next stage of the assessment day – the 2 on 1 interview. We were called into a room one by one and interviewed by two people. There were a lot of questions but in general they mostly asked for you to give an example of a time where you showed certain attributes. From what I can remember I was asked about a time I went above and beyond for a customer, a time where I had to follow a specific set of rules and a time where I had to break the rules and why I thought it was necessary to do so. There were other questions as well but those are the ones that I remember most clearly.
After that I went home and had to wait for a response. Unfortunately for me I was really ill the next week so spent a week laying in bed waiting to hear back, while a few people I met on the day found out the very next day! Finally I got an email offering me the job, on the condition that my background checks were successful.
Once I received the offer I had to have references from the past 5 years of my life – which for me included 6th form, university, a number of part time jobs and a trip to America. Needless to say this took a couple of months to go through, and I also had to get a criminal record check. Once all this went through I was given a slightly earlier start date for my training. I started training 3 and a half months after my original application which felt like both the longest 3 months of my life and also the shortest!
Once I started that wasn’t a guarantee that I got the job either – I had 5 weeks of gruelling training to pass, with exams almost every day and stressful practical assessments. I can’t really go into too much detail about the process but just know that there were a lot of tears from everyone and lot of stressful evenings doing self lead learning, but also some funny memories and lovely new friendships. It’s a bit cliche but we went through a lot together and came out the other side stronger for it!
That’s all for now, as I’ve got an early flight tomorrow! But stay tuned for lots of stories about my travels and all the new places that I’ve visited/will be visiting in the near future!
Much love,
Aimee x
The Life of an Aspiring Writer 