Heather Hillier | From air pilot to the Maritime & Coastguard Agency | An inspirational story for the new Civil Service Apprenticeship Strategy

The Career Changers

Today the UK Cabinet Office has launched the Civil Service Apprenticeship Strategy with the aim to emphasize quality training and set targets that will help build a more diverse pipeline of recruits into government by 2025.

What does this mean? That the UK government is becoming one of the leading voices of “the career changers movement”, opening the door of a new career to people whose careers have been affected by the pandemic.
Heather Hillier, our special guest, is one of those people and she is here today to share her career change story. Heather is a former airline pilot who lost her job during the pandemic and embarked on a new career in government via an apprenticeship.

Heather joined the Maritime & Coastguard Agency in July 2020 during lockdown. Prior to this, she was an Airline Captain with Flybe, until the company went into administration in March 2020.

Aviation has been her career path for almost 26 years. Her husband was also a Captain with Flybe so they found themselves faced with the overnight loss of their entire household income on 5th March 2020.

She set out to find a job to pay the bills, but as Covid started to take hold she realised that the impact on the aviation industry was likely to be far-reaching. This is when she started thinking about a new career. She saw the advert for a Talent and Development Trainer with the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which she found appealing as it was about helping people achieve their potential and making a difference in a job that mattered.

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