According to the official website of Southwest airlines (www. southwest. com), the major key value drivers include building an efficient team of employees with strictly defined functions; providing high responsibility for the quality of flights; providing coordination on all levels; an emphasis on the importance of employees in the company. The driving force of changes in the next 5 years is going to be the increasing role of employees’ responsibility for the quality of flights in the airline. Airline industry faces many problems nowadays which will cause major changes in the industry in recent years.
After the Sep 11th events, 15-20% reduction of airline capacity occurred. However, the major force driving changes in the airplane industry in the following years is going to be training new employees with high skills for efficient working in the airline industry. The Southwest airline has already faced this problem. At present, there are 34,000 employees working for Southwest airlines. Due to the low skills of employees, the performance of the company and thus the value of shareholders are not on the high enough level.
For the moment, the net income of the company is estimated by 443 million USD, and the total operating revenue is 5,9 billion USD. The issue of low-skilled labor force is the weakest in the airline industry nowadays because the labor force in it doesn’t answer present day realities. As far as Joseph Durso mentions, one of the airline companies has 75% of employees who have been working for it for more than 25 years and are older than 40 years. About 5% of employees are under 35 years, so it has very few young people with modern outlook which is a very negative factor.
Whenever the slowdown in flights occurs, the first people who get fired are the newest ones with minimum experience. Therefore, the workforce in the airline companies mostly remains middle-aged and not welcoming changes or developments. At this time, there are very few young people who have graduated from prestige universities who are looking for jobs in airline industry. Even though there are some MBA graduates who would like to work at Southwest airlines, they often tend to look for jobs in other industries, like computer or electronic industry. The level of skills which airline industry employees perform is very low.
In order to achieve the employment of entry-level employees with high basic skills, it’s necessary to provide different training programs for young graduates, or team with universities which could provide special courses which could be beneficial for further working in the airplane industry. Another beneficial factor could be government sponsoring of research projects in the aircraft industry. This research could be very beneficial for the future work of Southwest airlines because their business is connected with risk. Donations for research in the industry decreased more than by 50% after their highest point in 1987.
The rise of research in the industry could also provide it with high-skilled specialists.
Bibliography
1. “At What the Price Value” (www. reveries. com) 2. Barbara M. Ross and Lauren G. Krasnow “Cameraphones: Innocuous Gadgets Or Workplace Threats” (www. torys. com) 3. Debra Eckersley “Drive performance to a new level”, 2000 4. Executive summary on Aviation Security (www. piperrrudnic. com) 5. Janet Kraus “Loyal Employees Lead to Loyal Customers… Which Lead Back to Loyal Employees” (www. doit. circles. com) 6. Joseph Durso, Michael P. Zepf “Industry Studies 200: Aircraft” (www. ndu. edu/incaf/industry/2000/aircraft/aircraft. htm)