If the jungle telegraph is to be believed, EUROCONTROL is discovering that they have slimmed down just a wee bit too fast and too much. So much so, that in certain areas of expertise there is a lack of people to do the job.
To cover such cases it appears that they are organizing internal conversion courses. You need a safety expert? Get a radar guy ready for something new, put him or her through a one (!) month conversion course and you have a newly minted safety expert.
Apparently the long standing ban on hiring new people will also need to be lifted to some degree and there will be new hires, preference being given to young people straight from university. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, except for one thing. When Boeing or Thales hires young folks, their lack of experience is compensated by the environment into which they arrive and the collective experience of those already working there. EUROONTROL has divested itself of most of its talent base and the new hires will arrive in a near vacuum.
Who will guide them to avoid reinventing the wheel?
from an internal point of view, a lot of problems we’re facing at Eurocontrol originate internally (sic!) from people who have never worked anywhere else and therefore do not have experience of seeing a healthy variety of solutions to common ATC or engineering problems.
don’t quote me on this…