Hiring spree: UK aviation recruiting increases by 42 per cent
The UK aviation sector has gone on a hiring spree, as recruiting has increased 42 per cent year-on-year in July.
Data released today by LinkedIn showed that recruitment in the sector went up compared with the overall UK hiring rate, which has seen a 15 per cent drop.
Operative roles, as well as drivers, cleaners and flight attendants have returned to be among the most sought after the pandemic led to thousands of redundancies.
Labour shortages were one of the main reasons behind this summer’s “travel chaos,” which disrupted hundreds of thousands of Britons going on holiday abroad for the first time since Covid.
Commenting on the data, aviation analyst Alex Macheras told CityAM: “When the shortages threw air travel into chaos earlier this summer, airlines and their partners further ramped up recruitment in a bid to save the summer and the upcoming autumn travel season.”
To guarantee smoother operations, industry titans such as Heathrow and Gatwick were forced to put a cap on both daily departing passengers and flights, forcing the likes of British Airways and Easyjet to cancel services, CityAM has reported.
According to stakeholders – including Easyjet’s chief executive Johan Lundgren and Philipp Joeinig, boss of aviation services firm Menzies – the labour crisis hit the UK harder as a result of post-Brexit immigration rules.
The government rebutted the accusations, with ministers saying shortages were widespread across the wider continent.
“If there were aviation workers spare on the continent of Europe, you’d expect them to be [working] at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and solve the [hub’s disruption] issues but that isn’t happening,” aviation minister Robert Courts told the BEIS committee in mid-June.