Dubai: Just months into his job, Munther Juma has a plan for Emirates, and it involves a lot more local national faces at Dubai's prized national carrier.
As vice-president of national recruitment and development for Emirates, Juma presides over a programme to attract the brightest young students from high schools and technical colleges.
The need for new talent is acute, as its current staff level of 28,000 could reach 35,000 in the next two to three years, Juma said.
The company will double its fleet of planes in the next few years and hire thousands of new technicians, flight attendants, travel agents, managers, engineers and pilots.
The annual target is to hire 500 locals per year.
Juma said the company is on track, with 350 onboard so far.
In fact Emirates ' national recruitment campaign received its highest number of applications ever, tallying over 2,000 applications from summer job fairs. Juma could not say what percentage of Emirates Airlines' staff were locals.
Emirates offers benefits like health insurance, interest-free loans, and federal pension schemes.
And it has invested millions of dirhams into gleaming new facilities such as the Emirates Engineering College. Juma's motivation has grown beyond merely filling spots in Emirate's ever-burgeoning operations.
"We have 13,000 high school students and 7,000 college students graduating per year. We need to accommodate them, invest in them and develop their skills, and try to help the community," he said.
His upcoming recruiting campaigns will see him personally visiting high schools in all seven emirates. Earlier campaigns have seen young cadet pilots making trips to job fairs and dozens of schools to serve as the capable young faces of Emirates Airlines.
For Emirate's young pilots-to-be, it's an exciting new world.
Some were treated to their first airplane ride no short-hop plane ride to Abu Dhabi but to Adelaide, no less where Emirates conducts its flight training under always-sunny Australian skies.
Cadets also bravely entered the belly of what appears to be a massive egg on hydraulics life-size flight simulators that portray the cockpits of Boeing, Airbus and Gulfstream aircraft down to the every switch and gauge.
At Emirates Aviation College in Al Garhoud, classrooms are filled with young cadets who have traded in dish-dashas for the blue and white officers uniform.
From 600 applicants this year, 40 have made it so far, varying in ages from the late teens to early 30s.
"Training to be a pilot teaches you to be responsible," said one young cadet, Abdullah Sajwani.
