Qantas Is Hiring Thousands of New Roles — Including Cabin Crew, Pilots, and More

Looking to take on a high-flying career? Qantas may have a job for you.

On Friday, the Australian airline announced that it's creating over 8,500 jobs with plans to fill the roles over the next 10 years. The jobs include 4,500 cabin crew positions, 1,600 pilots, 1,600 other operational roles, and 800 engineers.

“We order aircraft up to 10 years in advance,” Alan Joyce, the airline’s CEO, said in a statement, “so we need to think similarly long-term about the people and skills we need to operate them.”

The airline also announced that it will be launching the Qantas Group Engineering Academy by 2025 to help train some 300 engineers a year to meet its own demand. It also specifically wants to recruit and train more women to help them enter the field. The importance of the academy, Steve Purvinas, the federal secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, said, cannot be overstated.

"The academy is desperately needed, without it, there won’t be enough people to fix aircraft," Steve Purvinas, the federal secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, told the Sydney Morning Herald, noting that that workers who left the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic "left a gaping labor hole."

Though the news is promising, it still doesn’t cover the number of job losses the airline suffered over the course of the pandemic. The Herald reported, the company eliminated some 9,800 roles from its more than 30,000-strong workforce as part of its $1 billion restructuring aimed at recouping losses.

Beyond jobs, the airline is also power-boosting its post-pandemic growth with new planes and routes, including its Project Sunrise Airbus A350-1000, which is slated to fly direct routes between Sydney and Melbourne to New York and London.