2024 - A Year in Review
Hello everyone!
I've been sort of quiet with updates as life has gripped what little precious time I have and summarily taken it away from me, but I promised transparency and it wouldn't be the advent of a new year without a blog post now, would it!?
Firstly, as ever, we need to recognise the contributions of our mentors, examiners and staff. Our department is one the most highly demanding across VATSIM and we deal with people from all walks of life, from all situations and with various learning capabilities. We work in a complicated environment subject to regular change - and my team stay abreast of that and continue to deliver high quality training. In three of our ratings, we've performed more rating upgrades this year than last - in one case performing to just over 150% of last year's throughput. This is hard work, in a hard environment, and my thanks go out to all of my team, past and present, from the most infrequent mentor to the hardest working of my staff - thank you for all that you do, for all that you continue to do and for sacrificing so much of your time for the enjoyment of others.
Exams
The division conducted 161 examinations this year, resulting in 143 rating upgrades. Both of these numbers are, sadly, slightly below 2023's numbers (161 vs 166 and 143 vs 145), but continuity is key in what we're doing. We also needn't forget the exemplary contribution to C1 rating upgrades of our outgoing En-route TGI coming into 2024. However, we must recognise the contribution to this years numbers of our Approach Training Group. Last year, we saw 10 S3 rating upgrades but followed this year with 16 - a 160% increase in rating upgrades year-on-year. Given that it is commonly accepted that S2 > S3 is the hardest rating upgrade to obtain, this is a huge achievement and my thanks go to our team of S3 mentors led by @Samuel Lefevre and our approach examiners for their efforts.
There are also some interesting statistics that we can start to draw from the statistics between this year and last:
This year in TGNC, we saw an average of 6.8 sessions per rating upgrade. In the previous year, this number was 7.2. Our TGNC training is becoming more efficient.
This year in TG TWR, we saw an average of 12.5 sessions per rating upgrade. In the previous year, this number was 12.8. Our tower training is becoming more efficient.
This year in TG APP, we saw an average of 16.4 sessions per rating upgrade. In the previous year, this number was 32.8. This is an absolutely extraordinary improvement.
This year, in TG ENR, we saw an average of 31.6 sessions per rating upgrade. In the previous year, this number was 14.8. This is an absolutely extraordinary degradation in performance.
As ever, we must consider some relevant caveats for this. Specifically, a student who passed their rating upgrade this year may have done the bulk of their training last year, whilst a number of mentoring sessions from 2024 may not lead to a rating upgrade until 2025. However, averages are averages and the numbers speak for themselves.
We must consider why our en-route training performance has degraded so much and I will explore this with @Kye Taylor and @Will Jennings in the coming days. My initial suspicion relates both to traffic volume and pilot quality, but we'll need to do some more digging and report back.
Mentoring
This year, we saw 1,408 mentoring sessions take place across all training groups, compared with 1,506 last year. There's an argument to say there's reasonably clear correlation in a reduction of mentoring sessions as the year has gone on but that's not quite true in all training groups and so the correlation isn't as clear as I would like. For example, in Q4, TG TWR had its second busiest quarter, whilst TGNC had its quietest across all of my records.
We must also consider that, sadly, we've seen a lot of variation in the leads of various training groups. With @Reece Buckley being appointed in TG TWR and @Kye Taylor being appointed in TG ENR, I hope that we can see a return to stability in 2025 and that we can continue to make progress with mentoring. I am reassured that we're seeing TGNC, TG TWR and TG APP all improve in efficiency throughout 2024 - likely testament to the introduction of block training in both TG TWR and TG APP, championed by messers @Will Hinshaw and @Samuel Lefevre respectively - my thanks to both for their efforts.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me is the impact to our waiting lists. I am pleased to say that for the first time since I took up this post and, I suspect, for a long time before that, our OBS > S1 waiting list has decreased in size. That's right folks - if you join now, you'll have less time to wait than if you'd joined 3 months ago. The fun doesn't stop there - we've also seen a really significant decrease in the size of the waiting list for TG TWR. After a year of effort, tweaking, hard work and dedication across the department, alongside the longer-term impact of GCAP, the waiting lists are finally reducing in size. I am very proud of the work of all of the teams in achieving this - thank you once more.
Summary
It's been a very interesting year to say the least. We are now half-way through my minimum tenure in this post, having committed a minimum of two years to the role. In some areas, I'm quite behind what I had hoped to achieve - testament to the complexities of working in this voluntary world and various things outside of VATSIM dominating my time. However, we should consider what we've achieved and what we're continuing to work on:
- We have a new structure in place for S1 training, with early indications that this is having a good effect on our waiting lists. Efficiency is improving here.
- Block Training for both S2 and S3 training appears to be working, alongside new syllabi in both TGs.
- We've made some new appointments across the department.
- I've had the first round of feedback from the DSG on new ATC Training Documentation which I hope to publish Soon(TM).
- We've had some really useful features delivered by our colleagues in Tech, with more to come.
- Ably led by @Craig Stewart, we're hoping quite soon to see a new Sweatbox scenario generator to make our training more varied.
- Near the top of my agenda now are some initiatives to find out why people stop mentoring or controlling in the hope of changing this.
It's been a good year and I look forward to what 2025. As ever, I openly invite questions, challenge and suggestions in the hope of making the department even better. For now, a belated Happy New Year to you all and I hope to see you behind the scopes or in virtual cockpits soon!
Adam
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