For a career with easyJet, British Airways & pretty much any other airline - Think IT

A long, long time ago....in the days when British Airways and state owned flag carriers ruled Europe's skies; airlines were run by pointy hatted people in the the finance department. This was very helpful as it meant executives knew exactly how much money they were losing. At that time, the most commonly trodden graduate path into a ground-based aviation career was a degree in accountancy and a place on BA's coveted financial professionals scheme.

My own entry into British Airways came via a marketing rather than a finance pathway. 1989 saw the low-key first year of BA's marketing graduate scheme. The accounting graduates outnumbered us ten to one; a necessary ratio in their eyes. The prevailing wisdom was that marketing people, even trainees, needed to be kept on a tight leash. Left unsupervised they were prone to squandering money that could be better spent on hiring more accountants and purchasing supplies of red ink for the annual accounts.

On my first day with the airline I was given a tour of BA's Hatton Cross HQ. Only the fourth floor was carpeted, a thick plush that contrasted with the utilitarian covering of the lower levels. The offices had impressive signs on the doors and the business cards of their occupants either had Capt before the name or letters denoting a financial qualification after it. It was blindingly obvious to me. The fly-boys (and back then it was pretty much exclusively boys) and the bean-counters ran the place.

This state of affairs couldn't go on for ever, though it lasted long enough to see many into a comfortable retirement. As the 80s drew to a close, the iron grip exerted by the finance department had begun to weaken. A technological revolution gathered pace as a small group of airlines including British Airways invested huge sums into the development of computer reservation systems (CRS). This allowed the airline to get itself in prime position onto the screens of tens of thousands of travel agents around the world. Carriers without their own CRS were obliged to pay a small fee every time one of their flights were sold through a system in which their competitors had an ownership stake. These individual transaction fees added up to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues every year. BA was a lead player and major investor in Galileo, a CRS owned by a consortium of international carriers. American Airlines owned Sabre, the largest and most profitable of all them all. At one point, Sabre had become so valuable that the airline’s chief executive, Bob Crandall, said his computer reservations system was worth more than the carrier itself. Skilled workers proficient in the arcane computer programming languages that powered these systems were being offered six figure salaries and signing-on fees. Sales, marketing and finance staff looked on jealously as the nerds flashed the cash. Some swallowed their pride and retrained as computer programmers. BA's computing professionals was now the graduate scheme to be on.

It couldn't last. Eventually those on the wrong side of the CRS equation ran bleating to the regulators who called a halt to the technological arms race. It was no longer as lucrative for an airline to own a CRS and the IT department was no place to advance your career. The HR department sharpened their scythes. Hundreds of nerds with transferable skills left for better paying jobs in other industries. The natural order of things had been restored. Route one into the airline industry for a newly minted graduate was once again finance. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for progression within BA many of the marketing graduates moved on.

By the mid 90s the industry's tectonic plates were shifting once more. De-regulation of North America's aviation a decade earlier had triggered radical change. Barriers to entry tumbled, hundreds of airlines, including giants like PanAm, went to the wall and a new breed of low-cost carrier epitomised by Southwest Airlines, was born. Now the same deregulation had spread to the skies of Europe. Stelios and easyJet were in the right place at the right time. Suddenly everyone was talking about the customer, direct sales were the name of the game, advertising budgets rose sharply. The industry started to go ticket-less. As the pieces of paper started to disappear so did many of the finance roles to account for them. It was a great time to be an airline marketeer. Sales and marketing graduate schemes were overwhelmed with applications.

Then in 1998 the aviation industry was hit by a technological tsunami. When easyJet's IT Director said the airline should build a website to take advantage of something called the internet the idea was initially dismissed. Stelios didn't take long to change his mind and when he acted he did so decisively. Within two years, ninety per cent of easyJet's bookings were made online. Since then the change hasn't stopped. Automation has taken over the entire industry, swathes of jobs that used to be undertaken by airline employees have been effectively outsourced to the customer. Behind the scenes, keeping the virtual cogs turning are the new power behind the orange throne, the IT people in all their guises: business analysts, programmers, data managers, network specialists, digital experts.

Its difficult to see the clock turning back any time soon. Every airline has become utterly and irrevocably hooked on technology. An IT outage on the scale of what hit BA has focused the minds of the industry's bosses. The risks of under-investing in people to support the complex web of technology are apparent to all. Today IT is the power behind easyJet's orange throne. Whats more, in the light of recent debacles, these jobs look safe from the threat of outsourcing to foreign climes.

So to any young person with their heart set on a non-flying career with an airline, my advice is to brush up on your computing skills. Oh, and as Bill Gates once said "Be nice to nerds. One day they may be your boss".

Tony Anderson is the author of "easyLand"