Good day to you from the PCC Team.
We wanted to let you know about an issue with document formatting that has come out over the last two to three years.
Background - there are many ways to apply for a pilot position - Online Application Forms, Resume or CV Upload onto a Webpage, Sending through regular Mail, Sending through Fax, Sending through Email, and finally hand delivering your Documents.
We want to talk to you about an issue with e-documents; meaning the documents you send electronically without actually printing them out. In regards to the above....we mean documents sent through Upload into a Webpage (where it says 'Attach your Resume/CV here') or documents sent as attachments to an email.
All documents on your computer have a suffix that tells you which software was used to create the documents. We at PCC have used Microsoft Word software for our Pilot-Resume/Pilot-CV creations for the past 15 years. To this day we recommend Microsoft Word because of its ease of use and also because almost every computer across the globe already has a version of this program. And that way it is user friendly - the company will easily be able to click on it and open the document.
HERE IS THE CAUTION:
The original suffix for Microsoft Word documents is '.doc'. In 2007, with their new Microsoft Office 2007 version, they slightly upgraded their MS Word Software and made the default suffix on any document '.docx'.
Unfortunately, they also made it so that only the newest versions of Microsoft Office (2007 and later) and Microsoft Word could open this '.docx' style of document. If you have your Pilot-CV / Pilot-Resume on this type of document - then you risk many companies, who have yet to upgrade to MS Office 2007, not being able to open and view your documents.
PCC SOLUTION:
We at PCC still recommend using MS Word Documents for your Pilot-Resumes and Pilot-CVs. If you are now using MS Word 2007+ though, we want to let you know a fix for this issue - simply can go into your settings/options for MS Word and select the SAVE DOCUMENTS page. Here you will have an option on how to save each document you create - the default will be listed and will say something like 'Save As MS Word 2007 - .docx Document'. You want to change this and have it say 'Save As MS Word 2000-2007 - .doc Document'.
Once you have done that, all documents will be saved to the older format. And now all of your documents will be easily opened and readable by almost every computer across the globe.
Other options for e-documents - convert them to .pdf documents or even .rtf documents. These will also allow almost every computer to read your paperwork.
The important thing here is not to send out .docx documents.
We hope the above makes sense and is helpful. We are seeing more and more .docx documents arrive each day and want to make you aware of it's issues.
Also - as a reminder, none of the above pertains to printed out documents. If you have printed your documents out, you can mail, fax, and/or hand deliver them. The article above is simply dealing with sending your documents over email or through the internet.
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**For more information on PCC's Pilot-CV / Pilot-Resume Design Service, go to the left menu and look under Career Services.