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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:05] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome back to In-Orbit the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world. Brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and today we are gonna be traveling back to Belfast. For a panel discussion from the ISAM Conference 2025.
This time it is on developing the future workforce and it's led by Vicky Jewel, Skills Lead from the Satellite Applications Catapult, and the panel delves into programs like Workforce Foresighting, identifying skills gap, and how we can promote diversity in the space sector.
[00:00:43] Vicky: Happy to have all of you with us here today.
This panel will look forward, proactively to what we can do to improve the future space workforce.
We'll be digging into how we can utilise programs like Workforce Foresighting to identify and counteract skills gaps of the future. To review standards and evolve to both degree courses and professional training to address those needs. We'll be looking at how we can increase diversity in our workforce, both through actively improving ED and I practices to promote accessibility of the sector, but also enabling diversity of thought, through, encouraging career changers who bring their expertise in from other sectors.
So before I hand over to the panelists, just a quick hello from me and an introduction to what we're going to be talking about.
My name is Vicky Jewell. I'm Skills Lead at the Catapult. This means that I look after the portfolio of skills activities at the Catapult. Where we aim to maintain a holistic knowledge of all the different skills issues across the pipeline. These panels were first conceptualised by Kathy Boden, who is recently retired, but still rocketing around the countryside.
One of the biggest levers that the Catapult uses to try and be proactive about skills issues before they arrive on the sector's proverbial doorstepis workforce foresighting,
Our plans, when Kathy and I first discussed this panel focused around thinking about those people who are already in the workforce and how the sector could upskill and re-skill for ISAM. So using the delta revealed perhaps by things like the foresighting activities between say the level four apprenticeship and the missing training provision.
So for anyone working as an engineer in space, they all know what ISAM is, and that it's on the horizon, that it offers a great deal of opportunity, and ditto for those people considering policy and law from a space perspective. But that's slightly different from those who might, be pivoting in from aerospace, from nuclear, marine engineering, law.
The list could go on and we need to help understand and leverage those capabilities to help address the immediate needs for skills in ISAM. But then as things developed, it was clear that we can't talk proactively about making changes to the future workforce without recognising that we also have wider responsibilities to address considerations around ED&I So how do we encourage when we're thinking about that future workforce, how do we encourage diversity? And as I said, that's not only just in terms of thought and their career background, but also to ensure that we are being actively inclusive for groups that have traditionally struggled to access or progress in the space sector.
And so with that introduction in place, I'm going to turn to each of our speakers to introduce themselves more thoroughly, sharing perhaps a bit of their background and their current roles and projects that they have been working on.
So first on off, I'm going to pass over to Benice.
[00:03:46] Bernice: Thank you. Morning everyone. I'm Bernice Huntley. I am the Future Workforce Lead at the UK Space Agency. It's my role to ensure that the UK space industry, including ISAM, has the skilled people that it needs. We know that this is a large and growing industry. A couple years ago, we know that it was worth just under 19 billion pounds with 364 billion pounds of UK GDP being supported by our satellite services.
However, in the Skills Survey 2023, 95% of our industry were reporting skills gaps, and these were the number one barrier to growth in the sector. So it's really important we do something about our skills gaps. We know that there are particular gaps, particularly for ISAM, software and data professionals are hard to find, systems engineers, machine learning, and AI. We expect that to get worse in the future.
Currently the highest demand is for the mid-level roles. We seem to be doing better at getting young people into the industry. But mid-level roles are really hard to recruit for and we do have some notable underrepresented groups. So females currently make up less than a third of our workforce, and indeed, female entrepreneurs in the UK space industry are very, very underrepresented. People from lower socioeconomic groups are very underrepresented in the industry, and we're currently working hard to understand why that is, but also what we can do about that. And there are certain ethnicities such as black people who are also very underrepresented.
So the agency currently is targeting those mid-career gaps. I'm looking at what we can do about that, particularly with regard to maybe career converters. We have excellent engineers in this country who hopefully with maybe some small amounts of training could convert into the UK space industry. We do still target early careers, but we are very aware of that mid-career gap.
So what's the agency going to do about this? At the moment this is very caveated. I'm sure most of you in the audience will be aware that government is currently undergoing a spending review.
So at the moment, we don't know longer term what our budget is. We know most of the issues that we face and we have some idea of how to solve them, but at the moment, the things I'm going to talk about aren't guaranteed. So I'd like you not to go away thinking that they are. One of the biggest things that we use in the agency is the space skills survey, which is normally biannual, and we survey industry and academia, and we use that data to tell us where our gaps are and therefore to work out a plan.
It is highly likely that shortly we will go ahead with a new skill survey. The last one published in 2023 had data on it from 2022. We are now 2025. You know, 3-year-old data for us is very old data. So we need data. So if the audience members, and in fact the panel, if nothing else, please could I encourage you to fill in that survey when it comes out, it is crucially important to us to know exactly what the issues are in industry and academia so that we can hope to address them.
Last year we set up the training programs fund. That was a first for us, attempting to deal with that mid-career level problem. We gave over two and a half million to five grantees to set up training programs aimed at career converters, aimed at the mid-level those career gaps. It has been phenomenally successful. We have had over 5,000 people attend those training opportunities, and we have a lot of anecdotal evidence of butchers, cleaners, using particularly the geospatial course up at Fife College, to transfer into the UK space industry. So assuming the spending review allows for it, we would hope to run a new training programs fund to increase that.
Many of you will be aware that this year we didn't fund the main SPIN Internship program that the Catapult have been running this year, in our absence. We very much hope to set up a new internship program, possibly trying to think about those underrepresented groups and how we might address those.
We will be going ahead with improvements to the space training catalog. For those of you not familiar with it, it now lists all of the space training in the UK, and what I'd like to do is to get the Space Skills Alliance who own the catalog, to actually maybe move it towards making it easier for career converters to find the training they need at that mid-level.
We continue to fund scholarships to the International Space University, and indeed eight of our scholarships students are heading out to South Korea in a couple of weeks for the summer. This is really important for them to get breadth and depth of industry knowledge, but also for the alumni that those people will gain those connections across the world that the industry will need.
We continue to fund the Space University's Network, which is a network of academics, hopefully improving space academia across the UK, and we continue to work with the European Space Agencies Education Department. So that we have a little bit more joined up thinking on education.
Lastly, I would say that we continue with the Space Skills Advisory Panel. For those of you who don't know about the Space Skills Advisory Panel, it brings together representatives from government, from academia and from industry so that we can all talk about the issues that the industry has and how we might solve it.
As I say that heavy caveat in amongst all of those, these are things we would really like to do, and I'm quite sure that some, if not all of them will go ahead as soon as the spending review is finished.
[00:10:32] Calypso: Hello. I'm Calypso Kulasegram, I'm the Head of Operations at Orbit Fab. We do In-Orbit refueling of satellites. That's less relevant to what exactly we're talking about today, and I would say that I'm here because basically I'm a wearer of all hats within my company, so I do HR, I do procurement, I do finance, I do contracts, and with that I do all the hiring, right, and I'm also kind of your diversity hire check box. If you were going to do a Bingo card, you would win bingo with me.
But I don't want to hire people because of check boxes, and I think these conversation are incredibly important because I think we should be trying to be more inclusive and trying to hire people so that we're not just, you know, trying to meet those requirements, right. So yeah, it's a very big passion for me to talk about this because obviously I am in all of the boxes to be able to say I'm here and I've managed to get to the stage of my career while also having all of those disadvantages and hopefully being able to lead a team so that we don't check boxes and so that we are essentially being inclusive. Diversity is a byproduct of inclusivity. Essentially, if you create a workforce that is incredibly inclusive, diversity will follow.
So that's what I do and that's how I hire, and that's the culture that we've created in our company. By that I mean, I don't think anybody in my team would feel unsafe to express who they are because I've tried to lead by example and say, Hey, I have a disability, I'm going to be open about this. I'm different sexuality to most of these people. I'm a female presenting individual. I'm mixed race, so I understand it, you know, Anybody in my team can then speak to me about that. And I want to have an open door policy, and I think that is something that we should be outspoken about.
I'm just here trying to discuss ways to help create the workforce and help bring in innovation through creating a very diverse workforce. Looking into different sectors so that we can hire from automation and other manufacturing sides, bring in other talent that isn't necessarily just space, and that's something that I work with recruiters. We've got some in, in the audience here today, and just across sector. So that's me and that's why I'm here.
[00:12:42] Kathryn: Hello, I'm Kathryn I am a system engineer.I'm approaching 30 years in the industry, which scares me slightly. I've mainly worked in the industry from concept development, system engineering, and then, I moved into engineering management. So I managed the system engineering team for around 10 years. I had a brief spell outside the space industry in high altitude UAVs as a COO in a company. So I did all the functions like yourself for a year and then decided I didn't like it and came back to being an engineer. But through my experience in all these roles, I've been engaged in doing recruitment, staff development, stem and training, and in a couple of my roles I've been involved in both writing and delivery of training for people within the industry. So that's CPD training, things like introduction to space for both non-technical people and technical people, and also our company has a whole range of training programs that we can deliver. But we've also developed a training satellite, which we have sold to universities. It's better training outcomes if you can actually get hold of something real and use it, and instead of just learning some theory, actually do some experiments with something real and it's representative.
And we also are excited to be doing an open enrollment course at Catapult, at the end of October, which is covering people moving into the industry, both from non-technical, so it's covering introduction space for technical and non-technical, and also an introduction to system engineering for space.
Reason why I'm here, I'm very interested in the CPD. We need to fill those mid careers gaps by looking at other areas. So both developing people up, so I've been involved in grad programs. But also by developing, people from other sectors and moving them in by providing them with appropriate training.
And yes, we need to look forward to the future and think about what skills we're going to need. But I think one thing that, we're going to suffer from is that we don't know what skills we're going to need necessarily now. So I think we need to develop people across all parts of the industry with good, solid skills in their area, say engineering, but the ability to think up new ideas, work on new ideas, have that ability to pick up a problem and think about, where else they might get some expertise from and think outside the box a bit. But on a solid foundation of good practice and sound engineering and things like system engineering.
[00:15:17] Zaria: Excellent. I can already see there's a lot of common themes that are popping up across the panel, so I guess that's what we're going to spend most of the time talking about. So yeah, so my name is Zaria. I'm currently a Product Strategy Engineer at Astro Scale.
Which means absolutely nothing. I think explaining my role is really difficult because I'm an engineer that sits in the business management team that works on regulation policy. I lead bids, I do feasibility studies. I do a little bit of everything because that's what I like to do and I'm so grateful that I was able to land here.
Butto really make it a little bit more inclusive to be able to grab those mid-career roles, to entice people to move over to the sector. I think there is a little bit more clarity needed around, you know, what are the skills that we are missing, which, you know it's ever changing. It's something that's ever evolving and it's something that we need to kind of continuously be updated on. But also how do we think of ourselves as a little bit less special?
Because we are very special. Space is very fun. Space is amazing. But I think sometimes we think a little bit too much that we're so different to all of the other sectors that we have to solve this problem ourselves.
So that's kind of why I'm here today. I'm, you know, an engineer. I work in business, I work in policy, I work in all of these different areas. I want more people to get excited about space sector and to join the space sector, and I think there's a lot of great initiatives at Astro Scale that we're trying out to, to get people there.
[00:16:41] Chris: Morning everyone.
Right, I'm Chris. I'm from the University of the West of England, typical Academic. We're saying about a number of hats that we're all wearing. So I'm here both as a representative of University of the West of England, and also as a member of the Space University's Network, which is, as we said before, collaboration of a number of universities where a few years ago we decided that as, if you look at particularly aero and space, it tends to fall into that engineering bracket, whereas we all know that many people across business, marketing, all sorts of different aspects, biotech, they're also in space as well.
But a lot of the space tuition at the moment tends to be within the engineering and the science bracket, but especially things like physics. So we came together in order to help each other because most of the departments we were in years ago were very heavily dominated by aero, and most of us do have an aero background as well as a space background. And by coming together, we could share material, we could share ideas, and hopefully we could make a bigger presence within the universities. If you like, a realisation of how space had grown and how important it is to this country.
Universities have the job of opening doors and helping people to realise the futures that they really want to have. It's our job to help pave a way for them to get there. If you come from a school, particularly from maybe a family you want a particular career and nobody knows about how to do it. It's our job to help pave the way to do that. So within each university and within Space University Network, for those of you in industry, we really do need your help, and if you are an academic and you are not involved in SUN, maybe you might want to contact that and see if we can help a little bit as well.
On the other level with universities, it is our job to help develop that basic tier 1, 2, 3, which helps people to link, therefore with the research and industry. So it's our job within degrees, and that might be an undergrad, post grad, it might be a research PhD, and it might be continuing professional development for people into their fifties, sixties, and so on. But it's our job to deliver on for the undergrad degrees, that foundation of knowledge, that then means that you can almost tackle anything later on, and then specialist degrees to give you what is most important that's needed for that certain field. So that might be a very specialist one.
With CPD, normally we link very strongly with industry providers as well. So you have the state of the art of the people who actually apply that knowledge and develop those products are part of the people that actually teach the course to lead people on.
So why am I here? One of the problems I've seen in the past is how difficult it has been for people to start their career within space. I would say over the last few years, that has become much easier than it was, and I want to see that continue on. I'd like us, I think, as a nation probably, to make it easier for people to filter into the industry and know what that is. So maybe we need to cross link all the different opportunities and websites so that we can actually get that information very quickly, because students often find it very difficult to find the right place, the right company. They've often only heard of two or three, and so we hope that if we can cross link everything, there's a much better chance that they can find what they really need. And obviously from the research side, I want to be able to see if all my colleagues and myself across, not just UWE but all the other platforms of the universities, to be able to integrate better with industry in the space sector and hopefully to serve and to develop that.
[00:20:46] Kathryn: I'll now move on to one of my questions for the panel. ISAM activities are undertaken by companies across the country, here we are in Belfast. Some have started up specifically targeting the ISAM space and some are broader space companies that are now interested in accessing this potential or are identifying ways that they can pivot into this area. Recognising the challenge of embedding the skills required to work in space in general, and then specifically in ISAM. Surely there, there must be a concerted effort required between government, industry and academia, in order to achieve this?
[00:21:27] Vicky: And on the panel today, we happen to have members from each of thoseangles. So hopefully, it's quite nice to be able to see that, you know, proof of concept. We can all work together. We can all come together to share a constructive conversation about these issues. So I want to put to the panel how do we do this?
So I have two takes on this, right? One slightly more controversial and one slightly less controversial. So we'll go with a slightly more controversial one because why not? We've already had a hard question and this aside from everything that I said earlier about wanting to be inclusive, I think there are aspects of, if we want to build incredibly good talent and workforce. We can't, and shouldn't, be saying that everybody should be able to do this. So for example, like if every single university had the same course and they were all kind of teaching it like average levels and you're bringing up the talent that all have very similar things, you're not really pushing forwards to have the best talent that you can have. So my slightly controversial take, and I think we should back having more bespoke courses and more bespoke things so that we can then bring it in.
[00:22:35] Calypso: Equally, on the flip side of that, I think that yes, ISAM does have a need for very specific resource. But it's not completely different to anywhere else in the space sector. It's not completely different to any other sectors, essentially. We can bring resource in from automation, we can bring different types of like mechanical engineering. It's pretty much across the board. It's quite similar. You can learn that. We can bring graduates, we can like be focusing on what our actual skills and what are our needs that we have right now, and this is something that we talked about earlier and I think came up a lot in our first intros, is that we don't actually really know what we need to make ISAM a successful in terms of skills.
So if we're trying to make it more successful in five to 10 years, we should be figuring out what we need right now. We should be backing universities and trying to get them into, like I said, more bespoke courses, trying to bring out another skills survey, which as you said, three year data is not that useful anymore.
We're in new space, we're continuously innovating, we're continuously moving things forwards. We work in a way of, we're building things quickly to break things to then figure out what we've done wrong. And that kind of follows through into our academia, into our skills, into our needs. So roundabout, I think we should take skills from lots of different sectors. We should try and push into academia and make sure there are more bespoke needs and also figure out what we actually do need.
[00:23:57] Bernice: I think on the inclusivity perspective you can end up being quite preachy to people. I think it's about bringing the message, you know, the McKinsey Report is wonderful, actually saying that companies with high diversity are far more profitable than those without. So there is a moral aspect, of course there is. But it's about talking about profitability. But I also think that much of the sector wants concrete ideas of what to do about this. So I've started talking to the top 50 most inclusive employers in the UK and last year the top one was the West Midlands Fire Service. Who knew? 10 years ago, they had no female firefighters, and now they are the most inclusive employer in the UK. So trying to find the concrete examples. Well, how did they do that? How did they move in 10 years? So that we could take those ideas and use them in our sectors to target our underrepresented groups.
The only other thing I would also say is sometimes it's the language we use and we don't even knowingly use it. So Fife College, we're a part of University of Edinburgh's Training Programs fund this year, and in talking to them, they have a high proportion of students on the Scottish Index of multiple deprivation. So they are the very students we should be targeting, and I said to Fife College, do they come on our internship program, the SPIN Program? And the answer was no, because you preclude them. Which was news to me, and it turns out that our requirements to be on the SPIN program are you must be at a UK university.
So if you are at a college of higher education and further education, despite the fact these students aren't doing degrees and would be a massive asset to the industry, they don't feel able to apply. So sometimes it's those tiny little things that we all take for granted, and I don't know if Vicky, that was surprise to you too.
We just take it for granted that it's open to all degree level students, but we've used the wrong terminology and as a result we've put off very valuable people from the sector.
[00:26:15] Zaria: Just following on from that, I learned an actual, really good HR term yesterday called Space Capital. I think the idea that we're expecting people coming into our workforce to have space capital, to have space experience, like even myself when I'm hiring, you know, I, I feel more comfortable hiring someone who has space experience because it does feel like such a different sector and it does feel like if you've had experience in a sector or if you know the sector, you'll just be able to fit in a lot quicker. We'll be able to take you on a lot quicker. But that's kind of what needs to change because we're talking about growth a lot. We're talking about growing the industry. That means that it's going to grow from less of these like niche roles that, you know, that I do and more into general roles that we have in all of the other sectors. So to make it actually enticing to join we do need to demystify that a little bit. It's such a big problem with, language as well. I used to pride myself on not being part of the space sector and being able to talk to people outside of the space sector about space. And then I gave a talk where I talked about deorbiting, and, you know, it was just, it was something that was so natural to me and so completely foreign to everybody else and I think that's on us as well. You know, that's on companies to change the way in which we take on people,to meet them where they're at, to understand what they're lacking, to train them in that and to bring them in. We've seen such success with our graduates that we brought on. They've been amazing. I think we're recruiting now for the next cohort as well and just taking that time to, to really meet them where they're at. Even if it's not an aerospace course, even if it's not a space background, figure out what they need to get into the company. That's just been so useful.
The only other thing I'm going will land on is just that idea of drawing from other sectors or drawing from other people. I think when we did the Workforce Foresighting,it was run by someone who's not in the space sector. So, they had really probing questions about, you know, if you have a PhD in space sector, you know, how does that help your career progression? And there was blank stares from everybody. Everybody was like that, that doesn't help at all. You know, sometimes it helps you get a little bit experience. Sometimes it helps you get to know someone, but it really doesn't have a space in the space sector. So, those kind of questions are things that we need to keep asking ourselves because we are going to need people from other sectors. But we have to understand what we need first and then we need to understand how to explain that and actually go after those mid-career people who are in other sectors.
[00:28:44] Chris: Okay, let's see if I can remember all of those things to answer from a university perspective. The first thing on the wording that is a problem. We had a couple of conversations with a well-known international organisation that provides free courses to people for space that they were asking for people to either prove they were on a BEng course or an MSc. Well, in this country we do MEngs and that is a postgrad level, undergrad degree, typical British, and we had to go in and do quite a lot of exchanges to say, well, these are very good students. We really need them to be able to be eligible to go on these courses as well. So at the moment, I understand it is a lot easier, but I'm still not seeing the MEng appearing in the adverts either. So it is amazing how something so, sort of so obvious to the people that set these things up can inadvertently cancel out a whole lot of talented people. So that's the one on the wording.
Second one on the elitism. I think actually most universities would agree. The reason is that university courses, first of all, undergrad level, the responsibility is to ensure that the foundation, whatever that is, of whatever course, is actually brought through. And that's why these Foresighting, these collecting the skills gaps are so important because academics can use that to blend that into the degrees to make sure that whatever we consider is so essential to any particular subject is included.
But when we get onto the postgrad, then we're onto a different thing entirely because the numbers are generally smaller. Universities are businesses. They need to pay wages. That is the biggest bill of a university, and if there are not enough people on a course, it will after two years be closed down. So for a post-grad level, which attracts a lot fewer people, whether actually taught or research, that is where we need the supportive industry to know that it is genuinely of use and the people that go on it do have a genuine future once they've paid all that money and graduated or been sponsored from it.
As far as the elitism goes, a university knows that it cannot be an expert in every single aspect that there is. So therefore, there has to be a decision to choose, if you like cherry pick certain things, preferably, which do not conflict too much, particularly within the region that you're in. So many of the universities, for example, in the West, inadvertently work together as a team. Although they might not necessarily want to admit that because what we're looking for is to make sure that we don't necessarily all reproduce the same thing. When we do, we tend to come together. So a good example is the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, which is between two universities because that was considered critical to both universities research, so therefore work together. And I think that's where it turns out with the specialist courses as well. If you have a very, very, very specialised course, that would put a lot of pressure on a particular university to deliver it, unless they had a huge number of people in that area, which in terms of getting their wages and paying them, it's actually quite a dangerous thing if you've got a large number of people on a research area and those wages are subject particularly to having bids coming in all the time.
Therefore a lot of these specialist courses can be done. But what happens is we would actually look at bringing in experts from a number of universities to make sure that existed. And that's one of the ways that, as I said, a number of things like SUN and SPAN are set up so that crossing the line between different universities become a lot easier. I suppose the notes I had on this one were that we have clusters of space universities.So, in order to build, if you like, what you're talking about in the future, they are very important to all of us, whether industry or academia.
We also have the engineering council, and this is an important one behind the scenes for a universities because if we want an accredited degree, and most students know that if they want to get a degree, if it's not accredited, they will be at a disadvantage compared to other students who graduate with an accredited degree. So the engineering council needs to be part of these discussions because if they have too much that they are unfamiliar with and don't value, we cannot get the accreditation and therefore that course suddenly becomes much less viable. The other thing is we know students are very attracted to graduate training schemes. That might be the big boys like Airbus and Rolls Royce, but a lot of smaller companies have some very good graduate training schemes and it doesn't have to be a massive three different country experience. Space Forge is one of the good examples, isn't it? That actually has training schemes and develops people even though it's not a massive company.
So in that sense, it can be done even on a small level and students really appreciate that and therefore the other one is what we said before, the CPD and making sure that maybe we can link industry and academia to keep that flow going and show that it doesn't matter what age you are, how you want to change, or where you need maybe some up-to-date training, we can supply it somewhere. I think that's the job of all of us that provide academic or if you like, training to ensure that happens.
[00:34:15] Vicky: So thank you all for your thoughts. It is absolutely all about how we talk about this, both in terms of the vocabulary, and thank you so much for sharing that feedback, Bernice,
but it's also to do with us being brave enough to talk about these issues. To face the difficult questions head on. To have the bravery to, to raise,the problems that the sector sees and proactively engage with them rather thanletting them lie and then wondering why we're having this conversation again in another five years time.
I want to move on to thinking about kind of the impact of the programs that we work onand the work that we do. So, how do we ensure that the programs that exist in the space sector, or new ones being brought about, are as impactful as possible? So, how should we best measure our successes? Is it always possible to measure our successes? Also are companies measuring their expertise and developing those new capabilities as needed across the workforce.
As I alluded to, sometimes this is easier to achieve than in other cases. So we, we are lucky in the SPIN program that the structure of how we bring the SPINterns on allows us to create a really strong kind of map of both geographically, where those students are from, but also their backgrounds in terms of the anonymous ED and I data that that lends us. So that, you know, gives us a database of information to go from. Sometimes that's not the case.
So how do we measure these programs?
How do we make sure that the work that we do in this area that we've just underscored is so important, how do we prove the impact of those so that we can keep running these programs?
[00:35:57] Bernice: From government's perspective, probably our biggest data on where we've had successes and where we haven't is probably the space skills survey. So another plug, please fill it in. We know we, we have problems with AI and machine learning skills in this country, getting those people into the mid-career level and we can track that with the biannual space skills survey. We can track what is happening to that skills gap. For example, we do know that at the graduate entry level, we can track that we are doing better. The programs are having success, the SPIN programs, other programs that we run, scholarships, they are having some success. So that is one of our biggest pieces of data.
Certainly my department has just undergone, we asked NatCen to look at, all of our programs. Everything we've run and funded for the last three years to deduce whether we have had value for taxpayers money, and the answer came back, absolutely we did. They did an enormous evaluation. That's not to say that we can't improve, of course we can, and skills gaps are changing and hopefully the next iteration of the skill survey will tell us where those gaps are widening and where our program should go next. Personally I'm just undertaking a very large evaluation of the Training Programs Fund. It was new for the agency last year. It was two and a half million pounds. So I'm currently evaluating the five grants that we gave out. What effect did they have on people's lives? What effect did they have on the industry? Now that I will need to track for the next few years. It's not something about, oh, well did we get them into the industry? Or did somebody who undertook a geospatial course who was a cleaner before, yes, we want to know did that get them into the industry. But we also want to follow up. Did that course have any long-term effect? So that's certainly work that government needs to do.
[00:38:00] Kathryn: I guess I can point to the SPIN scheme and say measuring the success of that. I've worked a couple of companies that have had SPIN interns and I'm fairly confident that most of those have ended up working in the space industry. From a industry perspective, it's a brilliant way of, it's almost like a paid interview.
It saves a lot of effort for an SME on the recruitment side in the future. Cause we get a great student and SPIN and you get them to join the company. It saves you a lot of time and effort and you've already built a rapport, and even if they don't come and join you, we've had cases where we've had SPINs and they've gotten onto other companies and been successful. So that's fantastic.
And then I guess on the training side, on the CPD, it's not just about doing a survey at the end of a course. What you really need to do is go back to them in a few months time. Has it had a lasting impact? What bits worked for you and what bits didn't? That would probably be a good thing to be doing.
[00:38:56] Zaria: Just having that information is so incredibly valuable because, you know, I work for Astro Scale full-time, but I also have a really small startup Frontier Space Technologies, and you know, at Astro Scale we're a global company. We have 220 plus employees in the UK. Frontier has six, you know, and we're struggling to keep all six.
So I think the needs at the different levels, and the needs at the different points, whatever we do come up with needs to be flexible to be able to adapt to that as well. You know, just thinking even at Astro Scale, you know, the idea of apprenticeships, I think if we had apprenticeship programs, like everybody at senior levels will just go back and do apprenticeships. I think everybody wants to do an apprenticeship. But up until this year, I wouldn't really see where they would fit in the company with where the company is at now, you know? But over the next year we're definitely going to need them. You know, looking into the future, we're definitely going to need them, but that changes and it ebbs and flows and, I think a lot of people getting into the space sector, they love being hands-on. They love being practical. But that's not always what we need at the time.
So I think having that idea of what we are missing, being able to track that and being able to forecast it is just so important and I think one of the things that we do at Astro Scale internally that I'd love to see more companies do as well is just an idea of career pathways.
It is really, really difficult to do because the space sector keeps changing and the roles keep changing. But I think that's one thing that other sectors have that we don't really have of, you know, when people are at university level, knowing what they could go into and knowing what that progression looks like.
We have an amazing team, at Astro Scale that looks just at forward looking projects. But their roles are so not defined, you know, it's one of those things and it's difficult to find people to go into that because as an engineer, you want security. You wanna know what you're going to be doing, you wanna know what you're going to be working on and what that career progression looks like.
So I think that's another thing that we could maybe work on a little bit.
[00:40:58] Chris: Okay, if I try and do university perspective. One thing that does worry me a little bit is when decisions are made about who is the space university and who isn't. I hope that's taken in a wider context because virtually all universities will do courses which actually can provide people into the space industry.
So I would not like to see us go down the route of creating another elitist group of universities, which means that the majority are not involved and that is detrimental to this country, which a lot of those groups have been. And I'll get shot by maybe some of my colleagues at some of the more elite universities as we call them. But if you look at the mess that we're in, I think that's partly due to that problem. We've not in any way capitalised on the talent that we've had in these universities, in this country, within the space industry. So you can quote me on that one. As far as the impact goes, we can use the universities more in that all of them have what they call capstone projects. They have group projects. That covers any particular topic you want to think of, not just if you like space engineering or sort of astronomy. So if a company wants to develop people in a specific area, they can actually just issue, for example, Airbus do this. They issue each year a challenge of build the next Airbus or build another aircraft. They are not necessarily directly involved. They have nothing to do with the output. That is all to do with the students. They will come and evaluate if you wish, but they are deliberately putting out here, this is what sort of skills we want people to develop. There you are, there's a challenge, go do it, and it's there for a group project, which is particularly useful for universities. So that's one way that you can preempt a skills gap by actually pushing that in at that particular level. In terms of success, universities are probably easy because they've got lots of students, lots of statistics, and therefore they can actually find how many people apply for a course, why they apply for a course, what happens to them after they go, what levels they achieve and so on. That's fairly obvious, I think. But what I will do is I'll add a couple of more contentious issues in. The students that I know of, not just at my university, but across a lot of them are saying that they cannot find placements. There's not enough SPIN stuff to go round. They're desperate to have some industry experience.
Now, we actually run at the university internships for students so that they can, if you like, work for an academic, if they cannot get an outside one. So they get a feel of what research is really about. They can put that on their CV as well. But if there was a way to actually get more industrial involvement, more placements, that would be truly appreciated because at the moment, a lot of people apply and it just isn't there. That might be due to the nature of the space industry, sort of environment rather than the aero industry, which has been around so much longer and has so many bigger companies, perhaps.
The other thing that affects us at universities is short-term research funding, and that might not seem to be part of this, but it's actually developing people to enter in very specialist areas in the future. And because we can only have funding for maybe for a year or so, that is not necessarily a very good thing for a job perspective, or maybe you have maybe three years funding, then it stops. Very few people want to take that risk if they can have a full-time job. That's where we're not seeing the research landscape. We have lots of PhD offerings that people will not take up. One is that they're not quite sure particularly whether they can actually do something after that PhD, but more importantly, when you carry a lot of debt for all this university training that you're getting. The problem is that PhDs are very low paid compared to industry starting salaries, and so as a result, what incentive is there for anyone to go and do a PhD and become a real technical expert at a very detailed level world class? Why would you do that if you've got a huge amount of bills behind you and the amount that you get for a PhD is 10 to 15,000 pounds less than the start of salary and industry?
[00:45:13] Calypso: Really interesting and one can also completely agree on SPIN being a fantastic resource for both data and resourcing. Pretty much all of our SPIN interns that we've had, we ended up turning into graduates if they were graduating or they've come back to us after they've graduated. So I think that's, it is great. Equally I think on your point on industry experience and where we sit with that, the sector, especially in the UK and in ISAM we are a startup sector, and funding is hard, as we've already talked about, right? For us, we're a living wage employer, so we don't do unpaid interns, we don't do any of that. Everybody will be paid a living wage, and that's national living wage. That costs money. So when SPIN was funded, it was fantastic because that was an opportunity for us to be able to hire interns and bring people in for industry that so they can get that experience and then stay with us, andwe've hired four more SPIN interns this year without the funding.
You know, that's how much we agree with it. But we rely on the economy and we rely on knowing what the budget's going to look like each year, and that can be quite tumultuous and you know, it's just the nature of the sector. But, I completely agree that's, it's just a conversation that we should be having, right?
[00:46:24] Bernice: I will just add briefly in on that. The reason the agency didn't fund the SPIN scheme this year was due to timing. The timing of a one year strategic review, which didn't, wasn't settled early enough. The SPIN program has a very long lead in time. We need to go through commercial processes to procure a partner to deliver it, and then we need to set up with industry the placements, and then students have to be interviewed. So it's a very long process. We are acutely aware at the agency of just how well those internships do for the sector and for students. However, there is a limit to funding. So if my department is given a budget, we have a lot of things we need to do for that budget, and yes, we do need to fund some interns. We, we know that is a positive thing. But at the moment, the acute skills gaps are at the mid-level. So we have to make sure that we are doing something for all of our skills gaps. We cannot just continue with those at entry level. We need to have an eye on all the others, and I've no doubt when the new skills survey comes out, that will hopefully enlighten us as to future funding.
So yeah, in an ideal world, I'd fund, you know, a thousand interns. But if I do that, it means that we don't fund anything else. We don't fund a new training programs fund. We don't fund the ISU scholarships. We don't improve the space training catalog that people need for information.
So in government it's all about where are you going to cut that pie, and there's always a restriction financially and rightly so on everything we do. So it's about, for us, making sure we do the best we can with the money we have to address all needs.
[00:48:22] Vicky: Brilliant. Thank you, Benice. Let's talk then about that mid-level area. Let's talk about career changers and the kind of work we can do in that sphere.
If we focus a bit more keenly on those that are swapping in from other sectors, and I think the point that Zaria made about us not being that special, we need to recognise there being those common core themes, key capabilities, skills,but also technical that apply to multiple different sectors that we can kind of leverage and recognise that there are opportunities there.
But ISAM must feel quite remote. We know that as a sector we have something of a perception issue. But it can be remote both in terms of maybe being far off in the future for some people, but also removed from the kind of careerthat is familiar to them in the sector that, that perhaps they might move out of.
So how can we encourage that and is perhaps, ISAM an opportunity for us as a space sector to showcase the ways in which we have an opportunity to be sustainable in both, the way that we act but also the technologies that we pursue, and showcase that space can be a socially responsible arena, as well as one for great expansion.
So I wonder if anyone has any key thoughts on that one?
[00:49:43] Calypso: Yeah. I think ISAM definitely is kind of the leader within the space sector of social responsibility and sustainability in just its whole definition of what it is. But I'm going to take us back to the point that we were talking about language and market, especially if we're talking about bringing people in for mid careers, and kind of take a step back from ISAM specifically because the average person in the uk, especially when I talk about my job, doesn't know the UK has a space sector. They don't know any of it. So they're definitely not going to know about the niche part of the space sector, which is ISAM and what that means.
And I think that kind of shows that there is a way that we should be marketing space, essentially, and what we do. The language that we use, make it more accessible. So you take our tagline, right? Gas stations in space. It might be quite Americanised. I apologise for that in advance. But everybody knows what a gas station is and it brings those conversations for when I'm trying to explain quite technical things to say, well, you know, we all need to fill up our cars. We all have a petrol hub cap. We all know where a service station exists. So then I can explain how important satellites are, how important the space sector is. There's a way in which we should be marketing ISAM and I think we have a really good opportunity to do it based on things like that. Being able to talk to public, being able to say, Hey, we have a space sector, you should join it. But equally like this then takes us onto the conversation we said about cross sector. We are not that special, as we've all said. We are. We are, but we're not. From our company specifically, we've hired people from like Jaguar. You know, we've taken skills from other industries and they have been some of our best hires. They had no space knowledge before, but here they are, they're willing to learn and they have been in, in their industry for 5, 6, 7 years. You know, they understand the mechanics of things. I think that it's really, really important that we are kind of talking to people about it, and again, marketing so people can understand why they should join us and they can then feel as special as we do.
[00:51:43] Zaria: I completely agree with that. ISAMs going to be a great hook. So, so once we get people aware of the space sector, that's going to be a great way to actually get them in and say, actually, you know, if you are joining a space sector, this is something you can focus on.
But really we need to do the boring bits. You know, we need to make space, we need to de-risk it, we need to make it a little bit safer. We need to, you know, show people that if you join the space sector, you will have a job. You know, when I go out and I do outreach, generally what I tell people is, find something you're passionate about and then find a way to make it space, but do the thing you're passionate about first.
Because when we interview people, you know, we just want that enthusiasm. We want, you know, we want you to love what you do. But I'm not a hundred percent sure if they do that, they're going to get into the space sector. So I think there needs to be more of those opportunities.
On that point, as well, you know, it is one nice thing about working at Astro Scale that I don't even have to think about, you know, am I making impact? Am I making a difference? It's like it's sustainable company in space. It's great. So that already tick a box. It is again, it's something about perception for external people. We ran a workshop in Cranfield University once, where we got people from other sectors to, in, to help us explain and help us find out, you know, what does sustainability look like and how do we get there? And we got nowhere with that workshop because we started by explaining the fact that we send satellites up, we use them and then we de-orbit them by, you know, burning them up in the earth atmosphere. And it was just so many conversations around like, how is that sustainable? Like, what do you mean by sustainability? That's not a sustainable process.
So I think yeah, aligning ourselves a little bit more with how every industry think that's going to help us as well. Because that was a very big light bulb moment of like, okay, maybe we are looking at this in the wrong way.
[00:53:32] Kathryn: My only thoughts on this was maybe, putting together some examples or packs that we can, how do we find these mid-career people that actually want to come in and join the space industry?
We keep talking about these people out there. How do we find them? How do we advertise to them? I guess one area we could talk to are the recruitment specialists, I suppose, and I have had numerous conversations with recruitment specialists and, you know, had talked about maybe offering courses set for changers.
How do we advertise? Cause we advertise our jobs in certain ways. How do we get out there? I don't have the answer to that, and maybe that's something we need to solve. But I think that's something we need to think about and then as part of that getting out there. Finding these people that maybe might be interested in space industry, them bringing in these examples of exciting projects and how we're sustainable and attracting that group and, role models potentially, and having resources out there so that they could go and see what the career in this industry might look like.
You know, we do it already for STEM but maybe we should think about it for mid careers as well.
[00:54:38] Bernice: How do we do it? We talk to people like the West Midlands Fire Service who have done it and say to them, how did you do it?
So I think we're starting, we are not doing fabulously, but we are starting to be able to advertise to other industries and say, come and work for us.
A really big thank you to all of our panelists today for all of your insights and thoughts, and I hope that the audience found the conversation as interesting as I did.
[00:55:05] Vicky: Thank you all very much.
[00:55:07] Dallas Campbell: Once again, we'd like to say a huge thank you to all of our speakers, all of our sponsors, exhibitors, and delegates who helped make the ISAM Conference such a success, and of course, to hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and head over to YouTube to watch video versions of all of our discussions. And if you'd like to find out a little bit more about how Space is empowering your industry, you can visit the Catapult website or join us on social media.