{"id":347918,"date":"2019-10-22T11:44:41","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T09:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=347918"},"modified":"2019-10-22T13:36:03","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T11:36:03","slug":"saas-new-acting-ceo-started-off-a-flight-attendant-here-was-her-path-to-the-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/347918\/saas-new-acting-ceo-started-off-a-flight-attendant-here-was-her-path-to-the-top\/","title":{"rendered":"SAA&#8217;s new acting CEO started off as a flight attendant &#8211; here is her path to the top"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Zuks Ramasia started her career as a flight attendant at South African Airways (SAA) 27 years ago, and is now the airline&#8217;s acting chief executive officer (CEO).<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sanews.gov.za\/features-south-africa\/flight-attendant-acting-ceo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SA News<\/a><\/strong>, Ramasia said when she applied for the position she held a BA degree in Human Resource Development and BA Honours in English and Psychology from Rand Afrikaans University &#8211; now the University of Johannesburg.<\/p>\n<p>Five years into her job as a flight attendant, Ramasia started teaching cabin crew and pilots about safety and procedure, which is crucial for the team to evacuate passengers safely from the flight in case of emergency.<\/p>\n<p>A few years later, she applied and was appointed as an operations manager.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My career took off from there. I held various senior management positions at SAA and served on various boards within the aviation industry,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have not missed a single step on my way up to my current position.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ramasia said that during this process she earned a further diploma in airline operations from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which is a trade association of the world\u2019s airlines.<\/p>\n<p>She also graduated from the leadership development programme offered by the University of Pretoria\u2019s Gordon Institute of Business Science and a postgraduate diploma in management from Henley Business School.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Turning things around<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Ramasia acknowledged that the airline is facing financial problems and assured the public that there was a plan to turn things around.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Funding is still our biggest challenge because certain parts of our strategy have not been implemented when they were supposed to,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My duty is to ensure that I fast track the implementation of our existing long-term turnaround strategy. This keeps me up at night.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have five key pillars which are liquidity, balance sheet restructuring, revenue enhancement, cost optimisation and strategy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ramaisa said that using these pillars the embattled airline\u00a0could reach financial stability if we implement our long-term strategy,\u201d Ramasia elaborated.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We also understand that South Africans cannot afford to give SAA money every time because it is our responsibility to generate money through our own operations.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have an action plan on how to implement our strategy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/347812\/saa-kulula-and-british-airways-flight-disruptions-in-south-africa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SAA, Kulula and British Airways flight disruptions in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zuks Ramasia started her career as a flight attendant at South African Airways (SAA) 27 years ago and is now the airline&#8217;s acting CEO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":347922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-347918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348002,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347918\/revisions\/348002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}