German flag-carrier Lufthansa is launching a recruitment drive to find the “pilots of tomorrow”. However, the airline is asking successful applicants to be “more than mere aviators”.
Lufthansa is looking to find more than 2,000 new pilots between now and the end of 2025, with an emphasis being placed on candidates having strong social skills.
The airline believes that its pilots of the future must not only be (or become) incredibly skilled aviators, but also “managers of their crews and inflight hosts”.
The Lufthansa ‘flybig’ general recruitment campaign began at the start of 2023, but the latest drive is to find pilots, with further waves of promotion to come in the months ahead.
Recruitment is also being conducted via out-of-home advertising platforms and on all social media channels.
With its slogan ‘Pilot – your dream job, just better’, the recruitment campaign has already been launched online and in print media.
The carrier is hoping to find both newcomers to the pilot profession and previously trained ready-entry pilots looking to move across to a Lufthansa Group airline.
“The Group is also appealing in particular to young women who may wish to pursue a cockpit career. But anyone looking to occupy the seats on the airplane with the best views of all will need to show a keen team spirit and strong interpersonal talents – ‘A key cockpit instrument: social skills’, as one of the campaign’s messages runs,” the airline said in a statement.
The airline added that it is proud of the fact that its “cockpit crew corps is drawn from a wealth of paths and backgrounds” and that the job as a Lufthansa pilot can be “tailored to a wide selection of life circumstances and situations”.
“To not only sharpen the image of the pilot’s profession but raise applicant numbers too, the campaign also directs interested addressees to the corresponding career channels and the website of the European Flight Academy (EFA), the flight school of the Lufthansa Group,” the airline said.
Lufthansa’s European Flight Academy offers a two-year pilot training course, consisting of a theory phase in Bremen or Zurich, and practical phases in Goodyear (USA) and Grenchen (Switzerland) or Rostock-Laage (Germany).