I have been asked a few times what pilot job I liked the most, my air­line pilot job or cor­po­rate pilot job. I tell peo­ple that both jobs have their pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives and that both pilot jobs are very dif­fer­ent. In this arti­cle, I am going to mainly focus on the amount of con­trol a per­son can have over the pilot in an air­line pilot job set­ting and a cor­po­rate pilot job setting.

I remem­ber a few years ago I heard about a job sat­is­fac­tion study that mea­sured job sat­is­fac­tion and stress lev­els for man­age­ment and non-management employ­ees. The assump­tion by many is that man­age­ment level employ­ees might have a higher stress level and lower job sat­is­fac­tion than non-management employ­ees. The study con­cluded that job sat­is­fac­tion among man­age­ment level employ­ees was much higher and this con­tributed to lower stress lev­els. The man­age­ment level employee has the most con­trol which leads to more job sat­is­fac­tion. Based on my expe­ri­ence as an air­line pilot and a cor­po­rate pilot I would have to agree. Read more