How were working to support our nextGen members By Senior First Officer Dale Mudie, Chairman, BALPA nextGen O ver the past 12 months, our profession has gone from booming recruitment to more than 10,000 unemployed pilots across Europe. It has left all of you either in training or waiting to start training with a lot of fears about your career and what the future holds. With so much uncertainty, we your nextGen Committee have decided to change how we go about our business, so that we can best serve all of our nextGen members. Since the start of the global pandemic, our time has been spent working with our nextGen members in three main areas. The first was assisting MPL cadets who found themselves in a situation never seen before; they had paid for all their training, but were left with no mechanism for having their licence issued. Then came an increase in the numbers of members and non-members asking for our help in deciding whether or not to enter the profession and, if so, how to choose the right route. As the pandemic dragged on, we then saw an increase in the number of members concerned about continuing their training and, therefore, adding to their overall debt, with no signs of significant recovery within the aviation industry. As a result, we have decided to focus our efforts on three main areas of work over the next 12 months: 1. W e will continue to advise and assist our nextGen members who are either looking to enter training or are already in training. 2. We will continue our long-running campaigning and lobbying of both Government and industry to implement measures that break down the financial barriers to entering the pilot profession and mitigate the financial risk to future pilots. 3. We will continue to support our members who were training towards an MPL licence and/or those who had recently achieved a licence. We will take this one step further by actively seeking changes to the MPL structure so future trainees are not exposed to such high risk. We will also be launching an education campaign as part of this workstream, to further educate airlines about the MPL, and support holders back into paid flying jobs. To do this, we want to increase our opportunities for engagement with you. We will still be attending the live events such as Pilot Careers Live when they return but, in the meantime, we want to engage with you at home. Over the course of the next few months, we will be running Q&A sessions via our Instagram page @balpanextgen to answer some of the questions we are receiving, and we will also be running live webinars in which you can take part. Finally, expect to read individual stories of success in this space to keep you all inspired and motivated towards achieving your personal goals. As always, you can contact the team directly via nextgenquiries@balpa.org TAI LWI N D Your voice, your nextGen