Many people romanticize the profession of a stewardess: a beautiful form, endless flights above the clouds, and space salaries. But life is far from fantasy. Looking at carefree, playful cabin crew, you don’t always think their key task is to take care not only of your comfort but also of safety. So, their work requires appropriate training and skills.
Becoming the face of the national carrier of an airline is not so easy. Such a chance does not often occur – only when the company announces a set for the position of “flight attendant.”
What Are the Basic Requirements?
The steward/stewardess is the face of the company; therefore, special attention is paid to the appearance of the set. The first thing that applicants pay attention to is age. You should be over 20 years old. The height of candidates for girls should be no less than 165 cm, for boys – no less than 170 cm. It is easy to explain: too short a cabin attendant will be more difficult to reach the upper shelves, and too tall – it is inconvenient to move around the cabin (constantly bending down – it’s not a pleasant experience and unhealthy).
What to Take for the Interview?
For the interview, it is necessary to bring a resume and two photos – a portrait and a full-length image. The purpose of the interviewers is to find out whether the candidate can easily find a common language with different people and whether he is ready to move to another country. Well, if you worked in the service sector before and lived abroad.
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Training in Abu Dhabi: What to Expect
Upon arrival in Abu Dhabi, you need to undergo training at the flight academy, which lasts two months. You will be settled in the apartment where you live while studying and working. They will pay you a basic salary.
You study for five days a week. At 6:30 in the morning, they will pick you up by bus and take to the academy, and they hold classes from 7:30 to 16:30. You will study safety techniques – how to behave in a situation that happened on board an aircraft of one type or another. You will get a separate training on how to open and close doors in ordinary and extreme situations: during a crash, fire, landing on water.
At the academy, there is a mock-up of the aircraft in which they stage these situations. You even swim in the classroom: the ability to swim is one of the criteria for hiring. After a safety course, you will study a week how to provide first aid: taking birth, doing an indirect heart massage, and more.
What Else?
They will teach you to dress, dye, and do your hair. Masters showed how to tie hair because a simple bundle isn’t enough. Buying red lipstick of a certain shade from MAC is a necessity. The company collaborates with this brand, so they offered us a discount.
They also demand to use hair spray or gel so that even the smallest hairs would not stick out. On the nails, you can only do French manicure or use transparent color. There are certain requirements for clothes, for example: under a white shirt, there should not be white underwear, only flesh-colored.
The Other Rules and Requirements
The last three days of training will be dedicated to service because they consider it the easiest. You will be kept in a certain severity. You should be friendly even when you are just going to the academy. They will often intimidate you that you can lose this job easily.
It will be necessary to return home before eleven o’clock in the evening during the training. This rule is introduced recently, as many students go into all the life of entertainment in the UAE and don’t have time to study.
Every four days they hold an exam – it isn’t easy, many people even go to retake. It is impossible to write off the exams – if you get caught on this, you will return home. At the end of the training, you will pass the last test. You will get graduation, where they give you certificates and licenses.
When you graduate from the academy, you will fly off three flights as an intern who is called “supi,” which means supernumerary (supernumerary employee).