You can be a high flyer

Ginny Bishop is Air NZ’s international cabin crew manager. She started 11 years ago as a flight attendant. Picture / Fotopress

Forget the stereotype - much more is expected of flight attendants than supplying chicken or fish from a wobbly trolley that bruises aisle passengers' elbows.

Getting a job as a flight attendant isn't easy, says Air New Zealand's general manager international airlines, Ed Sims.

"We get hundreds of applicants at a time and approximately one in five get through.

"Flight attendants have to function at 3am at the level most of us function at midday in the office. It is as far from a 9-to-5 as you can get."

Airlines are keen on people with the ability to enter management and leadership roles after operational experience.

"A lot of applicants have pretty impressive skills. We get police, nurses, teachers, people in management roles."

Ginny Bishop is a good example. As Air New Zealand's cabin crew manager for the international airline side she is responsible for seven managers and 1230 cabin crew - 1100 in Auckland and 130 in London.

It has taken Bishop 11 years to reach this position. She became a flight attendant in 1994 after a year overseas. She had a consumer and applied science degree, two years of secondary teaching and fluency in German.

A year into flying Bishop enrolled extramurally in a postgraduate diploma in business administration. This qualification, combined with her frontline experience, has opened up a number of managerial roles, including project management.

Air New Zealand offers plenty of support to people wanting managerial responsibility, says Bishop.

"For example, when I took on my current role, I needed public speaking training to translate strategies effectively to my team in a language they understood."

At Qantas Jetconnect, Jo Tawhai recently "hung up her uniform" after 16 years as flight attendant. Like Bishop, Tawhai is now managing long-haul crew, 193 who fly globally out of Auckland.

Tawhai became a flight attendant after leaving the Air Force communications division where she trained in telecommunication systems.

After two years as an Ansett flight attendant, Tawhai was promoted to customer services manager, cabin crew boss. She then moved into assessment and training, including the assessment of staff's emergency procedure knowledge.

Tawhai went from there to a training and recruitment job at Qantas Jetconnect before becoming Auckland-based international cabin crew training manager in December.

Both Tawhai and Bishop say flight attendants need outstanding communication skills.

"You really have to be able to interact well with all sorts of people," says Tawhai. "My mum often gets young girls to talk to me about the role and I tell them, from a Maori perspective, it is the same as caring for visitors on a marae. You make sure they are settled, fed, housed. If you treat people with dignity and respect, you can't go wrong."

Both Qantas and Air New Zealand put applicants through assessment centres. Having a travel and tourism qualification will not automatically open doors.

Though Tawhai feels a travel qualification suggests an applicant's interest and dedication, she says graduates of the course are sometimes rather "moulded".

Bishop finds graduates a bit "cloned".

"They sometimes don't display their personality enough.

"We want to see passion, self awareness and individualism.," says Bishop. "We want them to hear how they've learned to deal with customers and it doesn't matter if that was learned serving ice cream in a dairy in Tutakaka. We want to see if they can converse at a friendly level and work in a team."

They say flight attendants also have to be responsible for their health - flying 14-hour stretches or four or five daily short hauls are tough on the body.

Sims says career pathways have never been better for flight attendants at Air NZ. Former flight attendants are heading a $180 million project at the airline while others are now in marketing.

www.qantas.com.au/info/about/employment/flightAttendants

www.ca.airnz.com/aboutus/careers/