According to the 2023 Space Sector Skills Survey by the Space Skills Alliance, 52 percent of space organizations in the U.K. have skills gaps in their current workforce. For 72 percent of those, the gaps are most prominent in software and data skills. These gaps are a result of struggling to hire new staff (48 percent), new staff not having the right skills (45 percent), and existing staff leaving (34 percent). The greatest impacts of these skill gaps are an increased workload for the existing workforce (72 percent), and delays in product development (65 percent), largely unchanged from 2020.
The 2023 study was commissioned by the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to inform the U.K. government on skill gaps and workforce challenges in the space sector.
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The Space Skills Alliance is currently gathering feedback for its next report on this subject but given those stark numbers and the prominent conversations across the industry, I’d expect the landscape to look fairly similar still today. That said, the UK Space Agency set out a workforce plan for the U.K. space sector in 2016. Heidi Thiemann of the Space Skills Alliance told me that a review of the 10-year plan revealed that most things have been achieved. The main area where there is a lot still to be done is the percentage of women entering the industry.
As Thiemann points out: “this is also a wider societal challenge that needs tackling before we can hope to make much headway as an industry.”
Most people across the industry will tell you there is a skills gap; however it seems there is not a shortage of graduates who are keen to join the space and satcoms sector and are competent. “There are currently more graduates applying for jobs in this sector than there are graduate jobs,” she says.
This was also echoed by Joanna Hart at Space Partnership. While Hart believes STEM outreach is important, she cautioned: “it needs to be combined with an increase in early career roles, else more applicants will be disappointed.”
According to data from the Space Skills Alliance, however, there are some key skills we are missing, namely electrical and electronical engineering, software skills, and radio frequency (RF) skills. Partly it is encouraging students from other, not necessarily traditionally space-themed courses, to join this industry. Of course, this also starts at school, making sure young people are aware of the industry and the opportunities available, but we need to make sure there is a follow-through. The Jon Egging Trust does fantastic work with people at risk of falling out of the school system, but they still need somewhere to direct them once trained.
So, as well as the efforts around STEM and graduate outreach, we need to find a way to increase the amount of graduate jobs available to ensure an influx of fresh new talent. Thiemann commented that graduates may need greater supervision initially, but having recently recruited graduates herself, she believes it is an investment worth making.
Plugging the Mid-Level Gap
By creating more graduate jobs we will also help to plug the mid-level gap, which is arguably the biggest challenge in skills shortage right now. This won’t be an immediate fix but would be a worthwhile investment for the coming years. We have a massive problem at mid-career level because the industry has grown dramatically over recent years with lots of new opportunities, but not enough people already in the industry with the right skills to maximize those.
The problem here is firstly companies trying to recruit mid-level people expect them to already know exactly what they are doing. That works if you recruit from within the industry — but with not enough people, we need to be attracting people from other sectors with transferable skills, and we will need to invest in the extra training to get them up-to-speed on the unique specifics.
Thiemann highlights: “There are no clear pathways to recruit people from other industries at this level. There are lots of initiatives aimed at younger people, but not for mid-level.” She also commented on the fact that many of the space companies in the U.K. are located in expensive, sometimes hard to reach areas, and wages are generally less than other industries so it is hard to attract the right talent.
What we are seeing, however, is a rise in people with a reasonably good experience setting up consultancies to target very unique skillsets. Lorenzo Arona of Safe Heavens, commented: “This is one way to help plug that gap by delivering niche and specialist skills to multiple companies across the sector and something I think we will see more of as we continue to battle this skills gap.”
One area where we are seeing a lot of activity is for space situational awareness. As Arona highlights: “Over the last decade the barriers to access to space have been significantly reduced. Companies can buy commercial off-the-shelf cubesat platforms from manufacturers like AAC Clyde Space and launch them on rideshare missions as the SpaceX Transporter. There are even last-mile services like the D-Orbit ION that deliver cubesats to a mission-specific orbit. This democratization of the access to space has created both heated competition in the provision of satellite services and an increasing need to coordinate space traffic.”
The talent gap is particularly pronounced in highly technical areas such as this. Arona continues: “The challenge for small companies now is to acquire the operational know-how needed to maintain space situational awareness, operate safely, and prevent in-orbit anomalies, both to mitigate space debris and to maximize service availability and revenues. Operational expertise is hard (and expensive) to get and the operational workload is often uneven, with high-intensity peaks between quiet periods. Hence the birth of boutique consultancy firms that can help plug this niche skill gap, build expertise, and support during period of peak operational workload.”
By enabling more companies to take this approach right now then filling in with more graduate opportunities, we can potentially drastically improve this in the coming few years.
How Can We Ensure a Coordinated Approach?
There are a lot of initiatives aimed at tackling the skills gap, even just in the U.K. From graduate training and intern summer camps at ESA to the Space Placements in INdustry (SPIN) scheme. There are also initiatives such as the Jon Egging Trust mentioned earlier and nationwide STEM competitions including CANSAT and UK ROC. These all deliver something different, whether it is encouraging youngsters to consider a career in space, helping arm them with the right skills to succeed. The Space Skills Alliance provides valuable insights on the skills challenges and opportunities in the U.K.
However, as Thiemann mentioned, currently we have a “scattergun approach” because no one is coordinating all of these activities and ensuring a nationwide focus for a common goal. Having a coordinated approach likely requires all of these organizations to work together and might also require one organization to be responsible for coordinating them all in some way. How that can work remains to be seen but it is needed to ensure that the hard work being put in doesn’t go to waste. VS
Helen Weedon is the managing director of Radical Moves and the Satcoms Innovation Group
