If your interested, here’s a US perspective:
Once you’re hired at a company you’re obviously the most junior pilot at the company. What fleet type you will be trained to fly depends on what has openings. If there are only openings for 737 First Officers then that is what you get. If there are numerous openings in several different fleets then those are assigned based on seniority to the new hires. The most senior person in a new hire class (the oldest pilot) gets to pick first and they go down the list until the most junior person gets whatever is left.
Another factor is base openings. A pilot doesn’t bid for just 737 First Officer, they bid for LAX 737 First Officer. Open slots at a company are base and fleet specific. If you want to fly the 757 then you will bid for what ever base has an opening. If you want to be based in LAX then you bid for what ever fleet type has an opening in that base.
So for a class of 30 new hires they will be given a list of openings that would look something like this:
5 IAH 737 FO
2 EWR 737 FO
10 CLE 737 FO
13 CLE MD80 FO
Everyone in that class would put their bid which would rank those 4 options from their first to last choice. The most senior pilot in the class would get to choose first, the next pilot gets to choose from what is left after that first pilot chooses and so on down the list.
Then about every 6 months the company runs another bid that would show any new openings throughout the company. Everything from EWR 777 Captain to CLE 737 FO. Then every pilot can bid for whatever he wants. He might not get it as it’s assigned in seniority order.
There are no requirements to go from right seat to left seat or from A320 to 777. If your seniority can hold the position then you will be trained to fly it. We had pilots go from Beech 1900D FO to ERJ Captain.
Getting hired is another whole issue. To get on with an operator who flies turboprops takes about 1500 hours total, 200 multiengine. Small jet operators (CRJ and ERJ) are hiring pilots with about 3000 hours total time and 1000 multi. Large jet operators (737 to 777) if they are hiring at all are looking at pilots with about 8000-10000 hours total time. The market is flooded with furloughed pilots right now which is one reason why the competative minimums are so high.
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