Air Pacific managers fill specialist vacuum

A group of 20 managers of Fiji’s Air Pacific Ltd will graduate this weekend with an internationally recognised business diploma in airline management, it was revealed today.

These Air Pacific group managers are now the lot of qualified workers eyed by the aviation industry to fill the gap left behind with the continued massive brain-drain experienced in Fiji, particularly in the aviation industry as more specialists opt for greener pastures.

As for the airline, it invests around $7 million every year in training, in particular securing international training for its employees to ensure it had specialists at hand when needed.

The management development programme, therefore, was a result of a strong and ongoing collaboration between Air Pacific and Praxxis Group Ltd, an international training and development consultancy based in New Zealand to train local employees.

The programme is fully accredited by the NZ Aviation, Tourism and Travel Training Organisation (ATTO).

Praxis Group managing director Bernie Frey said Air Pacific recognised that its people were its strongest assets.    

He said a prime example of this was a recent initiative to formally measure its organisational culture in an attempt to further improve its working environment in a collaborative manner.

“However, along with many other high tech companies across the Pacific, the airline has to continually grapple with brain-drain as many of its skilled workers migrate to New Zealand, Australia and the United States,” Frey said.

“In addition, Fiji does not have an extensive range of aviation specialists a company like Air Pacific can easily call upon,” he said.

“Consequently, it had to develop alternative solutions and one of the ways was through formal education such as the management development programme.”

In a statement from Air Pacific today, it revealed the airline signed a contract with Praxxis Group to provide high level skills training for its middle to senior managers.

It said this programme ran alongside training courses run by Air Pacific’s own training college where more than 4000 courses are run per annum for Pacific Sun and Air Pacific’s 950 employees.