Retirement is not an impending possibility for 58-year-old Nikki Kulin, whose ordinary day at the office looks instead various than the majority of.
“I’m off to New York tomorrow,” Kulin claims. “It’s blisteringly hot there at the moment, so I’ll probably go to a lovely air-conditioned cinema and watch a film – though I always make sure to stop by Chelsea Market whenever I’m there to have a lobster roll.
“I get to go to the States a lot. How crazy is it that it’s my job to have lunch in Los Angeles on a Wednesday afternoon?”
After at first training as a key college educator, Kulin ended up being a business owner, and has actually run 4 services. Most lately, she was experts in location wedding celebrations throughout Europe.
But while taking a trip with Virgin Atlantic on a household vacation to Orlando in 2022, Kulin pointed out in passing to a participant of the cabin team that she would certainly constantly wished to do their work.
“Why don’t you?” they responded.
“I said, ‘Surely not now, at my age’, but they really encouraged me. The rest of the holiday I was telling my kids that this was going to be my next job,” Kulin claims. “I could see them rolling their eyes.
“But it sowed a seed – when we got back, I signed up without telling a soul.”
Kulin currently invests the majority of her time at the office 30,000 feet airborne as a participant of Virgin Atlantic’s cabin team. Between trips, Kulin reaches invest a couple of evenings in among the 32 locations Virgin Atlantic flies to, which offers her time to discover.
“A couple of weeks ago, I was in Delhi being given a tour around a traditional market on a Friday. I was also able to take my son with me, and we went to the Taj Mahal, which was at the top of his bucket list.
“I love going to the Caribbean because I get to sit on a beach and read a nice book. But I’ll often see what the other members of the cabin crew are up to, too – it’s a very sociable job.”
Kulin thinks that her age offers her a substantial benefit in her work.
“Older crew members bring so much to the table. When I’m travelling with new members of the crew, they often assume that either I’ve been working for Virgin for years, or perhaps I’ve come from another airline.
“But it’s my life experience – I think I can defuse situations that perhaps other younger crew haven’t come across, or I can think of ways to go the extra mile.”
It’s not simply Virgin Atlantic that search for life experience as a top quality in prospective employees. Earlier this month, competing airline company EasyJet launched a “returnship” campaign, with the specific goal of hiring over-50s to its cabin team.
But Kulin is eager to alert those that are interested that requiring to the skies as a guardian is not as straightforward as many assume.
“While I was doing my training, my son asked me, ‘How hard can it be to be a trolley dolly?’ He had no idea. You have to do a five-week training course, memorising huge amounts of information, then take an exam with a pass mark of 88pc. If you fail your second go, you’re off the course.”
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The lots of rewards of operating in an airline company’s cabin team come with a price– the ordinary yearly wage for a UK steward is simply ₤ 18,821 according to job-finding web site Indeed, though those with even more experience can gain around ₤ 30,000, according to theNational Careers Service But this does not daunt Kulin.
“I’m still adding to my savings and retirement pot as I go, and we get a good pension scheme [Virgin Atlantic matches employee contributions of up to 10pc of earnings]. I’m still earning, which is better than not working,” she claims. “I think retirement is less of a thing these days – I don’t feel my age at all.
“I can’t imagine ever wanting to give it up, as long as I’m healthy. I just love to go to work. I have an insatiable and incurable wanderlust, and I love nothing more than getting on an aircraft and going somewhere.
“I can see myself doing it for at least 10 more years. I’ll still be going at 95, pushing the trolley like it’s a Zimmer frame.”
