I'm afraid that, no matter how you feel about it, rules is rules. You can carry out safety critical jobs from 18 but you have to be 21 to drive a train. I've no idea why this should be, but that's the situation we have. I'm quite sure that folk below this age would make perfectly capable drivers, but that little bit of life experience helps enormously with things like decision making, dealing with emergencies and keeping a level head when things are rapidly climbing the walls. If you've just come out of school and have no real experience to draw on, it's not likely that you'd even pass the structured interview.
As for pay levels, one thing you quickly learn on this job is that the headline rate of pay is all well and good, but conditions are king. It's not much good getting a tasty looking salary if you've no time, energy or inclination to spend it because you're effectively "owned" by the company. Besides, quite a few of these companies paying their drivers top dollar actually include a certain number of contracted hours of overtime per annum (usually 200 hours) in their basic pay. In practice this acts as a cap on a driver's ability to earn because of the way that these overtime hours are calculated and the work allocated.
The company I'm on has one of the lowest rates of pay for drivers. To balance that we have an enviable set of conditions that mean that the job is tolerable and doesn't make too many demands on us. If we want to earn a bit extra there is plenty of option to do so, as all overtime is payable. In fact, just working the rostered Sundays can be an easy way of minting a bit of extra coin of the realm. Naturally we could push for a much higher basic, but I firmly believe that we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by doing so because we'd have to give up way too much to get this. My colleagues over at FCC GN had the same conditions as us until very recently. Now they're on about £38k pa basic, but I'm not convinced that they think it's been worthwhile. Unfortunately, there will always be a decent number who get their heads turned provided the company dangles a sufficiently big carrot.
O L Leigh
https://careers.tfl.gov.uk/fe/tpl_tfl01ssl.asp?newms=jj&id=33320 They say £21,653 p.a. for the first 12 weeks core training, then upon completion of that it goes up to £38,311 p.a. from Week 13. Judging from the list of depots, the current vacancies are at Acton Town (Picc or Dist), Earls Court (District), Queens Park/Elephant (Bakerloo), Hammersmith/Edgware Rd (joint Circle & H&C), East Finch/Golders/Morden (Northern), Arnos Grove (Piccadilly), Seven Sisters (Victoria) and Wembley Park (Jubilee).
