Periodically the news is riddled with stories about how the airlines are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Lately the focus of doom and gloom commentary has shifted to finance and insurance companies, but that doesn’t mean that the airlines are doing any better. There’s one company that is seemingly never in the conversation about struggling airlines – Southwest Airlines. If you’ve ever flown Southwest, you probably know why. They do things differently, and it makes flyers happy. Even though it seems like almost no one can succeed flying commercial routes, Southwest continues to impress. A One Day, One Internship reader tipped us off to some amazing internship opportunities at Southwest Airlines, so we thought that we’d look at their entry level jobs today too. Air travel isn’t going anywhere – it’s too important to us, so don’t write off an entire industry because the other losers can’t get their acts together.

Future Booking at Southwest

Honestly, I’ve never heard of a company cited in more case studies than Southwest is. When I was studying Human Resources in college, I swear that I heard about Southwest’s corporate culture every week. It must make the CEOs of other airlines sick to their stomachs. Just look at the honors Southwest has received recently:

• Ranked 12th on Fortune’s “Most Admired” list in 2007
• Made Forbes “Platinum List” in 2007
• Ranked by Business Week as one of the top “50 Best Places to Launch a Career”
• “Most Admired Companies Among Women” by Professional Womens Magazine in 2006
• “100 Best Corporate Citizens” by Business Ethics magazine for eight years in a row
• “Corporate 100” by HISPANIC magazine since 2000
• Included in the “Top 100 Most Innovative Technology Organizations” by InformationWeek in July 2007

And in case you aren’t already dreaming about working for Southwest, you should know that they offer “FREE UNLIMITED space-available travel anywhere Southwest Airlines flies” in addition to a laundry list of other benefits or “freedoms,” as they like to call them. To get a sense of what kind of jobs are available at Southwest Airlines, you should first look at their position profiles. These will give you a brief overview of each type of job that Southwest offers, so when you look at their actual job listings you will have a good understanding of what you’re looking at. Their Careers site is exceedingly simple, and really easy to navigate. It’s also loaded with information. We love (LUV) it.

Of the 39 non-internship job openings that we’ve identified on Southwest’s site, here are some that might be a good fit for a new college grad.

• Source of Support Representative
• Crew Scheduler
• Ramp Agent
• Interactive Multimedia Developer
• Analyst I – Financial Control
• Accountant I – Accounts Receivable
• Avionics/Electrical Engineer

There are certainly more jobs to look at, some with slightly higher experience requirements. Most of the jobs are located at Southwest’s Dallas, TX headquarters (Ramp Agent openings are in Denver, Philadelphia, and Baltimore). Applying online for any of these jobs should be quite easy, so get to it!

Southwest Airlines also offers an RSS feed and e-mail alerts to notify you of new job postings, so if you don’t see anything that you like right now, you can sign up to be notified of future opportunities.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• Southwest.com
• Southwest’s Careers Site
• Jobs at Southwest
• RSS Feed of Jobs at Southwest
• Southwest’s Position Profiles
• About Southwest Airlines
• Nuts About Southwest (Southwest’s Blog)
• Culture at Southwest Airlines
• Southwest’s History
• Investor Relations Info from Southwest Airlines

Have you flown Southwest? Did you LUV it?

We've identified Southwest Airlines as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• accounting
• aerospace
• all employers
• Colorado
• customer service
• design
• engineering
• finance
• flash
• flight
• Maryland
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• transportation

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