{"id":12694,"date":"2026-04-15T08:41:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T08:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=12694"},"modified":"2026-04-15T08:41:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T08:41:00","slug":"give-that-1337-a-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=12694","title":{"rendered":"Give That 1337 a Job!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

Chances are someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you are a gamer yourself. After all, somewhere between two-thirds<\/a> and three-fourths<\/a> of Americans play video games, and if you just looked at young men, it\u2019d be closer to 100%.<\/a> Grumpy older people don\u2019t get it, complaining that gaming is just a waste of time, but gamers believe<\/a> it helps with their problem solving (although at a cost of sleep).<\/p>\n

Well, the good news is that if you are, indeed, a gamer, the Federal Aviation Authority (F.A.A.) is looking for you.<\/p>\n

Last Friday Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced<\/a> the F.A.A.\u2019s campaign to attract \u201cthe next generation of air traffic controllers,\u201d It is looking for people \u201cwho possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control, including:<\/p>\n

Demonstrated high cognitive functions<\/p>\n

Multitasking<\/p>\n

Spatial awareness<\/p>\n

Strategy and problem-solving\u201d<\/p>\n

By all that, they mean gamers. The announcement goes on to add: \u201c\u2026this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a slick YouTube ad<\/a> too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you bring on someone who has gaming experience, particularly with air traffic control, they have an edge up,\u201d Michael O\u2019Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior F.A.A. official focused on air traffic safety, told<\/a> Karoun Demirjian of The New York Times.<\/em> \u201cThey\u2019re coming in with a skill set. But it doesn\u2019t replace aptitude, or discipline, or decision making under pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association supports the effort, with its president Nick Daniels telling BBC<\/em><\/a>:: \u201cOur union welcomes innovative approaches to expanding the candidate pool, including outreach to individuals with high-level aptitude skills such as gamers, so long as all pathways maintain the rigorous standards required of this safety-critical profession.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair, both the F.A.A. and the NATCA probably would welcome anything that might drive people to apply. The F.A.A. only has about 75% of the target number of controllers, leaving it several thousand short. Individual airports may be staffed even lower, as might certain times of day. It\u2019s not a new problem and it is not a problem that is going to be quickly fixed; it is not as though today you can play a video game and tomorrow you can be an air traffic controller. There is definitely a learning curve.<\/p>\n

It also doesn\u2019t help that air traffic controllers aren\u2019t usually paid during government shutdowns, which Congress seems to increasingly allow. \u201cThe failure to pay air traffic controllers for 44 days created uncertainty, drove many experienced controllers out of the profession and harmed the recruitment pipeline,\u201d a spokesperson from the Department of Transportation told CBS News<\/em><\/a> in November. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nor does it help that air traffic controllers rely on technology that is likely to be older than they are. The F.A.A. is trying, for example, to replace its outdated radar system<\/a>, but NBC<\/em> reports<\/a>: \u201cThe FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget just maintaining the fragile old system that still relies on floppy discs in places. Some of the equipment is old and isn\u2019t manufactured anymore, so the FAA sometimes has to search for spare parts on eBay.\u201d<\/p>\n

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy complained<\/a>: \u201cThis is 2026. The secretary talks about upgrading our air traffic control system. We have an old air traffic control system. This is why he talks about that. We need to upgrade.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was surprised to learn that gaming might not just be an asset to become an air traffic controller, but also an asset for air traffic controllers. Josh Jennings, a supervisor at the F.A.A.\u2019s air traffic command center in Virginia, told Ms. Demirjian that gaming is both a way for controllers to stay sharp, and as a form of \u201csocial currency\u201d among them. \u201cI would say it\u2019s probably tenfold on how fast this new generation is able to pick up on our physical tech, our radar scopes,\u201d he said. Controllers apparently often play video games on their breaks.<\/p>\n

In similar approaches to look for unconventional backgrounds, the Marines are looking<\/a> at dirt bikers to become drone pilots, while Russia is looking at university students<\/a> for its drone pilots. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

I can see the argument for recruiting gamers to be air traffic controllers. Both are used to obsessively monitoring multiple screens with lots of activity, requiring quick reactions, and with lives on the line. The difference, of course, is that for air traffic controllers, those virtual images represent real things, and the lives that may be lost are real people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

Still, given a choice between a controller who was a gamer versus some middle-aged college grad who is used to looking at spreadsheets, give me the gamer every time.<\/p>\n

I think about all this, oddly enough, in regard to health care. Some of you may also be fans of \u201cThe Pitt.\u201d<\/a> One of my favorite characters is head nurse Dana Evans, and I sometimes wonder if she would ever get tired enough of covering for ineffective\/incompetent doctors that she might opt to become one. \u00a0You can\u2019t tell me that she isn\u2019t smart enough and you probably couldn\u2019t convince me she didn\u2019t have enough medical knowledge, but in our system if she wanted to make such a change, it would mean sending her to medical school, then internship and residency \u2013 years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.<\/p>\n

Who, exactly, would that help?<\/p>\n

Where is the \u201cgamers, please apply\u201d equivalent to medical training, where non-traditional but potentially appliable backgrounds count? Could, for example, people with exceptional pattern recognition skills but perhaps not so good in chemistry or biology become excellent radiologists? Might biologists do well as pathologists, without all the years of physician training?<\/p>\n

For many decades a college degree was seen as the ticket to middle-class (or more) success, but we\u2019re seeing that\u2019s less true now. We\u2019re living in a digital world, and people are gaining skills and knowledge from that world that we\u2019re not fully recognizing.<\/p>\n

So kudos to the F.A.A. for recognizing how gamers might be good candidates, and I can only hope the subsequent training program isn\u2019t so tradition-bound that it scares them off. And I\u2019m waiting to see how healthcare and other industries might learn from \u2014 not just copy \u2014 its approach.<\/p>\n

P.S. If you are wondering, \u201c1337\u201d is gamer slang for \u201cleet,\u201d which is itself slang for :elite,\u201d as in gaming prowess. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD Chances are someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you are a gamer yourself. After all, somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of Americans play video games, and if you just looked at young men, it\u2019d be closer to 100%. Grumpy older people don\u2019t get it, complaining that gaming is just a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}