Why getting a pilot's licence is good for your career?

This story will tell you how I made great improvements to my professional career after getting a private pilot licence (PPL). With flying, I have no stress at work, my decision making became excellent and I am always fit and full of energy. Here is how I got there.

I hold a PPL since late 2016, flew over 600 hours and did almost 1000 landings since then. By the standards of General Aviation, I fly a lot. While private flying is very convenient, it costs time and money, so where is the benefit? How did I come to a decision to become a pilot?

In 2014 I faced a big challenge at work: how to make our incident management process robust, reliable and helpful to our customers. Back in these days, we had a very young product and problems happened. Our staff was often overwhelmed and our performance during incidents fell short of customer expectations. We tried all the resources we had in-house and, while improvements were made, it was not just good enough.

I asked myself a question: there must be an industry that solved the challenge of performing well in critical situations. This must have been solved already - and aviation came to mind. Commercial air travel started as a dangerous business and became a reliable, efficient and safe people transportation machine. With this, I started to look for an industry expert who would help us improve our incident management procedures.

I was introduced to Juerg Schmid, a 70+ aviator and a safety expert. His CV was impressive: ex-airforce, chief of SwissAir 747 fleet, chief of SwissAir (and later SWISS Intl Airlines) safety department, board member of ENSI (Swiss Nuclear Safety Inspectorate). Juerg reworked our procedures, cleaned up emergency checklists (the Checklist Manifesto is only a shadow of this work) and updated the selection process. The result was astonishing: much faster turnaround, less stress for our employees and customers.

I came to a conclusion that there is something special in the way pilots think that makes them excellent troubleshooters and decision makers. If they can solve a critical situation without endangering passengers and quickly make sense of a convoluted problem like the map below, I could benefit from this skill! This is how I decided to get a PPL licence.

You may think that being a pilot is only about learning how to fly. Well, this is the simplest part. In fact, flying is probably simpler than driving a car. I learned how to plan for unforeseen issues (such as weather, failures, deviations), evaluate possible options and make good decisions quickly and reliably. After I got my licence, I have never been stressed at work. NEVER!

Your decision making improves too: you are forced to build a habit of debriefing both successes and failures (leadership coaches call it reflection). You will still be making mistakes, but you will learn from them and your decision making will progressively improve.

Being a pilot comes with an extra: whenever you feel like you need to unwind, go for a flight and thoughts in your brain become clearer right after you land. Great views and a happy family is a bonus!

Contact me if you want to learn more or start your pilot career. Your decision skills, energy levels and resilience will get a boost and there will be no way back. In the next post we will zoom into two aspects that flying brings into your professional life: understanding yourself and your limits and frameworks for high-quality and fast decision making. Stay tuned.