Lufthansa Group is planning to make more than 4500 new hires in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2020, including 300 resulting from the Boeing 777 fleet integration at SWISS. Many of the hires — some 3000 — will be in Germany and are the result of a combination of staff replacement and job increases. About 1,000 of those will be with the core Lufthansa brand. About 2500 of the hires will be ground-based with 1300 flight attendants to be hired across the group. READ: OAG ranks Garuda as 2019's most punctual airline. Five hundred new junior positions will include 50 trainees and a focus on IT will see about 550 specialists hired in subsidiaries Lufthansa Industry Solutions and Lufthansa Systems. SWISS plans to hire more than 1000 employees this year, including about 500 flight attendants. The addition of two new Boeing 777s will create more than 300 jobs in cockpit, cabin and technical areas. The group likened the introduction of a long-haul aircraft to a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), generating jobs for an average of 25 pilots, 10 technicians and 120 cabin employees. Things are not so rosy at Brussels Airlines, Eurowings and Lufthansa Cargo where hiring freezes are in place due to internal restructuring and cost-saving measures. Austrian Airlines will reduce its head count due to “competitive redimensioning” but still plans to offer about 200 new jobs in Vienna in 2020. Lufthansa is one of Germany’s most popular employers and the group’s online career platform received more than 190,000 external applications in 2019. It offers more than 500 different job profiles and 28 “classic” apprenticeships in 16 locations across the three home countries as well as 13 dual-study programs and four trainee programs. The overall group boasts more than 135,000 employees worldwide and its head of human resources, Michael Niggemann, described its workfroce as "our most important competitive advantage".