The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the airline industry as travel advisories and bans grounded planes across the globe. As travel opened up, airlines took on new challenges with health and safety concerns. And, today, airlines, like other industries struggle to hire the full workforce needed for success.
Jon Roitman, chief operating officer of United Airlines, is in a unique position to discuss all of this as a guest of the VOE Podcast. Roitman is responsible for all airports flight operations, technical operations and network operations. He is also responsible for safety across United's global network.
The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Transcript:
Kristal Griffith:
Hello, and welcome to the VOE Podcast, an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. I'm your host Kristal Griffith from the Daniels office of communications and marketing. We'll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community.
Let's dive in. Joining me today is Jon Roitman, chief operating officer of United Airlines. In this position Jon is responsible for all airports flight operations, technical operations, and network operations. He is also responsible for safety across United's global network. Imagine those responsibilities during a pandemic.
Jon has been in the airline industry for 25 years working for United and Continental Airlines. He served in the U.S. Army from 1985 to 1992 and he happens to be a graduate of the Daniels College of Business receiving a masters in real estate and construction management in 1997. What an interesting background. Jon, welcome to the VOE Podcast.
Jon Roitman:
Thank you, Kristal. I appreciate the invitation.
Kristal Griffith:
Absolutely. We're honored to have you. So kind of I think the first thing we've got to ask you is how on earth you've gotten to where you are, right? You have such an interesting background. You have a bachelor's degree in engineering from West Point. You have a master's degree from the Daniels College of Business in real estate and construction management. So to me that seems so different than a COO of United Airlines, but I'm guessing you can make some sense of it for us. So how did you get where you are?
Jon Roitman:
Thanks, Kristal, and thanks for that first question. So first of all yes, I went to West Point and sort of time in the military as well. And when I got out of the military I decided I wanted to be a real estate developer and was fortunate enough to attend the Daniel's College of Business, which I really enjoyed.
And at that time this sort of tells you that you never know what's going to happen in life because at that time I was recruited by Continental Airlines, which was based in Houston at the time, to come into their construction and design group to build airports and for a youngster, a young adult back then that sounded really exciting. And I knew there were flight benefits and all those cool things.
So I pursued that opportunity after getting my degree at Daniels and started out doing really exciting things and designing construction around the world specifically to building airports. At the time Continental was really growing in Latin America so I spent a ton of time in Latin America and it was a lot of fun. But I only really did that short period of time because of the background I had in the military there were some leaders at Continental at the time that thought maybe I had an operational mindset because I had experience in that.
So they drew me into the operation side of the business pretty quickly and 25 years later I've progressed up to operations to the chief operations officer r...