Airline Pilots
Skills & Knowledge
Most Important Skills for Airline Pilots
- Operating Equipment—Controlling operations of equipment or systems.
- Monitoring Equipment—Watching gauges, dials, or other indicators to make sure a machine is working properly.
- Making Decisions—Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
- Monitoring Performance—Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action.
- Thinking Critically—Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
- Learning New Things—Understanding the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making.
- Managing Time—Managing one's own time and the time of others.
- Reading—Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work related documents.
- Teaching—Teaching others how to do something.
- Listening—Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
Most Important Knowledge Areas for Airline Pilots
- Transportation—Knowledge of principles and methods for moving people or goods by air, rail, sea, or road, including the relative costs and benefits.
- Geography—Knowledge of principles and methods for describing the features of land, sea, and air masses, including their physical characteristics, locations, interrelationships, and distribution of plant, animal, and human life.
- Computers and Electronics—Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
- Psychology—Knowledge of human behavior and performance; individual differences in ability, personality, and interests; learning and motivation; psychological research methods; and the assessment and treatment of behavioral and affective disorders.
- Mathematics—Knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications.
- Customer and Personal Service—Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
- Public Safety and Security—Knowledge of relevant equipment, policies, procedures, and strategies to promote effective local, state, or national security operations for the protection of people, data, property, and institutions.
- Mechanical—Knowledge of machines and tools, including their designs, uses, repair, and maintenance.
- Physics—Knowledge and prediction of physical principles, laws, their interrelationships, and applications to understanding fluid, material, and atmospheric dynamics, and mechanical, electrical, atomic and sub- atomic structures and processes.
- English Language—Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
Interests
Different careers may be a good fit for your personality or interests. This career is:
- Realistic—Realistic occupations frequently involve work activities that include practical, hands-on problems and solutions. They often deal with plants, animals, and real-world materials like wood, tools, and machinery. Many of the occupations require working outside, and do not involve a lot of paperwork or working closely with others.
- Conventional—Conventional occupations frequently involve following set procedures and routines. These occupations can include working with data and details more than with ideas. Usually there is a clear line of authority to follow.
Learn more about your interests. Take the MnCareers Interest Assessment.
Describe Your Skills
People who have worked in this career typically perform the following tasks.
These statements can help a prospective employer understand what you can do, on a resume or during an interview.
- Operating vehicles or equipment.
- Collecting information from different sources.
- Controlling machines and processes.
- Making decisions or solving problems.
- Monitoring information from a variety of sources to find problems.
- Identifying information by categorizing, comparing, or detecting changes in circumstances or events.
- Compiling, calculating, tabulating, or otherwise processing information.
- Inspecting equipment, structures, or materials to find or fix problems.
Careers that Use Similar Skills
The following careers use skills, knowledge, and abilities that are similar to those used for Airline Pilots.
View more careers in the Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics cluster
View more careers in the Transportation Operations pathway
This page includes information from the O*NET 24.2 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.
Source: You can learn about our data sources in the About Us section.
