Words of encouragement for low-timers

With how slow the industry is right now and how disparaging it may seem with all the doom and gloom surrounding finding jobs, I wanted to offer some encouragement and advice to any low timers struggling to find work with my own story.

I finished my training in late 2024, after a ton of setbacks, and had a job lined up right away at a survey company. I was hired and almost immediately laid off, and that’s when the struggle started.

I sent out close to 150 applications, to literally everywhere under the sun and heard nothing back from even a single place. I was disparaged, dejected and questioning if it was even worth continuing pursuing this career (I was 26, all my friends in other fields had jobs, some making upwards of 120k/yr). It’s human nature to compare yourself to others, regardless of much worse it makes you feel, you’ll do it anyway, and it sucks.

My big break happened when I found a skydiving job in March of 2025. I did this not simply by sending a resume to an email address, but by calling and bothering the owner of the DZ by chatting him up; using just about any topic to keep him on the phone. I was hired a few weeks later. My resume was nothing special, I had 290 hours with a CPL + MIFR.

Recently I was able to leverage that experience, and using a similar tactic as I did with the skydiving job, I found another job at a small charter operation.

My point here is that if you’re a newly minted CPL with no real work experience, you’re not special and probably won’t get noticed by whoever is reading resumes. My advice is to MAKE yourself known by calling, chatting, cracking jokes, whatever you want. Literally anything that makes you seem like an enthusiastic and likeable person. I’m pretty sure everyone here has something that makes them unique, so USE IT to your advantage. A lot of people say to apply in person, and that’s an even better option if you’re able to do it.

You’re not alone in your struggle, you’re not undesirable and you’re certainly not unemployable. You just need to make yourself visible among a sea of others who are presenting a resume that is essentially identical to yours, by any and all means necessary. You may think you’re being a pest, but a closed mouth never gets fed.

I wanted to share something that might act as a glimmer of hope among the darkness of unending TBNTs or just plain ghosting. This industry doesn’t really lay a path for the majority of us right out of the gate. There is a path for you, you just have to be the one to find it.