Alumni Profile - Sam Pearson

What appealed to you about UNSW and your degree?

I was a huge aviation nerd, so I always wanted to do something with aeroplanes.  I had a lot of trouble finding what I really wanted to do because I kept being steered towards engineering, but I didn’t want to build the aeroplanes. I wanted to work at an airline or with the aeroplanes. My mum was trying to be a great mum and help me find my career path and she actually found the UNSW course in Aviation Management. It was in a book from UAC that had every single degree on offer in NSW. She read it from cover to cover and found it. My careers adviser at the time was steering me towards engineering as there was no awareness or knowledge of such pathways.

I have attended many careers fairs on behalf of Virgin and when I am speaking to high school students and their parents, I really enjoy telling them that there are specific aviation degrees out there.

What is the most valuable thing you took away from your time at UNSW?

I would have to say it was the comprehensive knowledge of the industry.  I was able to go into my first couple of jobs and have a really good background understanding of the industry.

Where has your career taken you?

 For the majority of my career, I have actually worked in the commercial arm of an airline. I started at Virgin Blue in 2008 and spent a lot of time originally in the Schedule Planning team which is part of the wider network management. I moved to Canada and worked in Schedule Planning at Westjet.  I then made a move into Revenue Management with Virgin when I moved back to the southern hemisphere. I was co-located with Air New Zealand for a few years, doing Pricing and Revenue Management with VA but based in the NZ head office. We had a codeshare special arrangement where we coordinated all of our pricing and revenue management and it turned out to be difficult with the time zones, with only three hours in the day with both teams online together so they determined someone needed to be in the NZ office

I had another short stint in Schedule Planning before I became a Team Leader in Revenue Management with Virgin at their headquarters in Queensland.

I was one of the many unfortunates made redundant from VA in 2020 during COVID. It was such a volatile period, but I was one of the lucky people in the industry because I was able to get a job at a much smaller airline in the Northern Territory. I worked for approximately 12 months at Air North in Darwin. I was able to come back to Virgin in the same Revenue Management role whenthe airline started to grow routes back after the depths of Covid.

What have you enjoyed most about your career?

There’s something about Virgin that keeps me coming back and it’s the people we work with. We all have such a passion for the industry, and we have a passion for working well together. I know a lot of people that have traded around the various airlines in the industry, and they always mentioned how different it is at Virgin.

What innovations do you think the industry needs?

I know that something on the radar a lot at Virgin is AI and I know there’s a lot of people in various teams working on how we can use AI in a safe way. There are some opportunities to use it, but we have to be careful about people’s privacy. So, we are taking it slowly but there is plenty of innovation to come there.

What attributes would you like to see from a graduate of the program you were in, today?

The thing we learn on the job all the time is how to operate in a corporate environment. So giving students more knowledge as they are walking into a big business as to how they operate, from life skills to learning from the top down how the business develops its budget and how that impacts various departments and the overall strategy of a business, rather than the individual topics.

In the last three years, I’ve had 6 new starters come through my team. Some fresh out of uni and some not but I work with each of them to communicate how we work in the airline, and that will be different from every company, but it works better when the person has the expectation that they need to learn how the corporate flow works.  It is good for new starters to realise that the expectations they might have in their mind about how quickly they can move up the ranks is different. It takes more years than you would expect. There are different pathways to learn and one of them is being a real specialist in the role you are in and taking that as an advantage rather than sitting and waiting for the next promotion.

What would your advice be for those currently studying or considering the study of Aviation at UNSW?

If they are considering the study, definitely do it. I am a bit biased because it really does give you a great foundation. When looking for where to start, my career path didn’t end up as a perfectly planned career path. I made my way into an airline and learned a lot about it and worked out where I wanted to be.  There are so many more jobs in an airline than you ever realise until you are in it.