There’s bad news for anyone with lots of work experience hoping to land their dream career as a cabin crew at Dubai-based mega airline Emirates in 2024. It seems the airline isn’t as interested in your skills and will instead focus on hiring younger candidates.
Emirates intends to hire as many as 5,000 new cabin crew from all around the world over the next 12 months but in 2024, the airline says the recruitment drive will look slightly different than the last couple of years.
Explaining what the change is, the airline said in a statement: “The recruitment drive is designed primarily for those who will soon or have recently stepped into the world of work”.
“The airline is inviting fresh graduates with internships or part-time jobs on their résumés, those with a year or so of hospitality or customer service experience, and individuals keen to embark on an exciting career travelling the globe.”
So, what might that look like in practice? Well, the minimum age to join Emirates as cabin crew is 21 years old, which would be the kind of age at which someone might have achieved the small amount of hospitality or customer service experience that the airline is ideally looking for.
In other words, Emirates could be looking to hire cabin crew in their early to mid-twenties primarily.
Now, it’s important to note that Emirates hasn’t actually said this, and officially, there is no upper age limit to apply to become cabin crew. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that Emirates does hire candidates with a lot more experience, but the airline is being very clear that its main focus is hiring less experienced applicants in 2024.
In some way, this could simply be seen as a reset to how Emirates conducted cabin crew recruitment campaigns before the pandemic. In the last couple of years, however, the airline has been a lot more flexible in hiring cabin crew – after all, the airline had to hire a staggering 8,000 cabin crew in 2023.
This year, recruiters will continue to visit cities around the world as they carry out their search for the perfect candidates.
