Applying to Emirates at 21 with no work experience: is it pointless or is there a way in?
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#1 Engineering student in Alexandria, 21 in December, and Emirates has been the plan since I was about fourteen. The problem is the profile. Everyone who gets in seems to have three years of hotels or retail and I have a summer at my uncle's shop and two years of university.
What I have going for me: English is strong (C1 on paper, and I actually use it), Arabic obviously, some French from school. Height and reach are fine, no tattoos, clean passport. What I do not have is a single line of customer service on paper.
My questions for people who have been through the process:
- Does the online application filter out people with no service experience automatically, or does someone actually read it?
- If I finish the degree first I will be 23. Is there any advantage to applying now versus then, other than not wasting two years?
- Would a year in a hotel or a call centre actually change my odds, or is that a story people tell?
I have read a lot of the assessment day threads here and the pattern I see is that hospitality people do well in the group tasks because they are used to reading a room. That is what worries me more than the application form. I can pass an English test. I am not sure I can walk into a hall of 150 people and be the one who gets picked.
Honest answers please, including 'come back in two years'. I would rather hear it now.
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#2 Purser, six years. The form is read by a person after an automatic screen, and the automatic screen is mostly age, height, education and the photo, not job history. So you will not be filtered for the CV alone. But at the assessment the recruiters are looking for people who can handle a stranger being rude at 3am, and they get that evidence from your work stories. With no service job you have no stories, and that is where it falls down. A year in a hotel is not a story people tell, it is the difference between having answers and not having them.
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#3 Also from Egypt, applying now with three years of call centre. I applied once at 21 with nothing and got rejected at the video stage. I honestly think the lack of anything to say in the 'tell us about a difficult customer' question was the problem, I made something up and it showed. Finish your degree and get a part time job in a hotel lobby or a coffee place while you do it. Two years goes fast.
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#5 @ahmed2002 clean slate after the waiting period, nobody mentioned the first one. It only lives in your own head.
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#6 Ex crew and I sat on the other side of the table for a while helping at open days. Nobody cares about the degree except as a tick box. They care whether you have looked after strangers for money. A café job, a hotel reception, a summer in a resort, any of them. Do it alongside the degree, then apply the month you graduate. At 23 with two years of part time service and a degree you are a strong candidate, not a weak one.
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#7 Reading this as someone who went the other way, waitress for four years and no degree. We are all nervous about the thing we do not have. From what I can tell they want both and will settle for the service part. So get the service part.
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#8 One more thing. Being 21 is not a problem in itself, I joined at 22. Plenty of people in my batch were 21 and 22. They all had at least a year of some kind of customer job though, even if it was McDonald's. That is the common thread.