[RandomBacon]

ATC here (opinions are my own, not of the FAA, etc)

I agree those uncommon skills help make someone be a good controller.

Unfortunately I don't think the FAA is testing for that, of course the hiring process tests have changed since I was hired on.

(I hope someone from the FAA is reading this and tells CAMI. I was disappointed when there was no free text response on the survey they gave out a few weeks ago.)

[robocat]

> those uncommon skills help make someone be a good controller

Societies hiring norms are broken.

Everyone spends years at school before (a) being filtered by experts for aptitude, or (b) filtering themselves for fit. It is so sad to see teachers, lawyers, engineers, everyone waste years to discover they don't like a job or the job doesn't like them. The cost to society is percentage points of GDP.

Even worse is that nobody encourages us to quickly test different disciplines and discover unobvious fits. Internship or volunteer is the closest and requires me to do a lot of high-risk heavy lifting. Maybe I'd love being a teacher and maybe I'd be great at it. Who knows?

[duxup]

When I think of the “uncommon” hires (former truck driver, bank teller) who I encountered who had those skills I mentioned and thrived… they would never be hired today.

It’s sad.

[leoqa]

It seems like the biggest blocker for hiring is location selection.

[RandomBacon]

That is way up there too, good catch.

After going through the hiring process (application, test, drug screen, medical screening), they give you an academy start date and whether you'll be Terminal or En Route.

People who pass the Terminal training at the FAA Academy are given a list of low-level (lower pay) towers to choose from that are seemingly-random. It could be that there's a spot at a tower in your home town, but that spot is reserved for the class that graduates one week after your class, which means you can't go there, you have to take from the list you're given or quit (and some people do quit at this point).