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Topics of expertise include:
- Skills needs and shortages
- Space education and training
- Recruitment processes
- Space sector diversity
- Space jobs and career paths
Profile
The Space Skills Alliance is a not-for-profit think tank and consultancy working to address the skills shortage in the space sector.
It was set up in September 2019 by Joseph Dudley and Heidi Thiemann, who previously created SpaceCareers.uk, and have won multiple awards for their contributions to the space sector.
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5 Solutions to the Space Skills Gap
Today the Space Skills Alliance has set out 5 Solutions to the Space Skills Gap, a plan for expanding the space sector’s talent pool, increasing the number of experienced people, and making it easier for the sector to adapt to changing skills needs.
The five solutions include:
- Creating a space competencies framework
- Adopting best practices for recruitment
- Creating more opportunities for young people to get experience
- Making it easy for career changers to join the space sector
- Making training more responsive and accessible
Each one lays out exactly what employers, training providers, researchers, and government need to do today to address the space sector’s skills gap. Visit spaceskills.org/solutions to learn more.
Putting that plan into action, the Space Skills Alliance has launched the first catalogue of training for the space sector, as well as a new space competencies framework.
The Space Training Catalogue is a free directory of more than 400 training opportunities for the UK and European space sectors from astrobiology to additive manufacturing, remote sensing to rocket launching, and space medicine to spacecraft ops. Visit training.spaceskills.org to learn more.
SpaceCRAFT, the space competencies framework, contains 57 competencies across 8 themes.
It provides common vocabulary for alignment between education providers, employers, and employees, to make sense of the skills needs of the sector, support the recruitment process, and facilitate training.
The framework will continue to evolve to adapt to the needs of the sector, and all space organisations are invited to contribute to developing it further. Visit craft.spaceskills.org to learn more.
Joseph Dudley, Director of the Space Skills Alliance, said:
The skills gap is a whole sector problem and it requires whole sector solutions. The five actions we’ve set out are a starting point, but they cannot be achieved by one organisation alone; they are collective actions, and every space organisation, no matter its size or its focus, has a role to play and we invite them to work with us.