On 4 December 2024, in the context of the SpaceSUITE project, PLUS (Paris Londron University of Salzburg, Austria) organised the dissemination event “Space – A Career that Suites You” in Salzburg. The event brought together more than 50 students, job seekers, practitioners and professionals in the Space sector to discuss the current needs and requirements for a successful career in this domain. 

Next to a series of speakers from companies in the field, who shared their experiences and advices to write a success story in the Space field, SpaceSuite project partners also shared the preliminary results of the skill needs analysis. For this analysis, GEOTEC performed a large scale scraping of four job portals (Indeed, Euraxess, Linked In, Space Individuals), resulting in about 20.000 job offers in the Space field. After filtering and cleaning of the data, about 8000 relevant job offers were left, which were subsequently classified using NLP and machine learning models according to several criteria, i.e., required experience (in years), required degree (bachelor, master, phd, no or other degree/certification), academic / non-academic job, type of job (e.g., management, sales and marketing, engineering and science, …) and Euspa market segments. The resulting graphs, representing the results from different dimensions, were shown and explained at the event.

Finally, Sven Casteleyn and Marc Pardo (GEOTEC), together with Rob Lemmens (ITC, University of Twente) were also invited to man a station during the Space Career Fair, where attendants were emerged in various activities to explore the sectors GNSS and SatCom additionally (i.e., Meet your future boss, create your fit-for-future space profile). GEOTEC’s station consisted of 4 interactive large screen displays and demonstrated the Body of Knowledge (BoK) in EO / GI / SPACE, which was only recently extended to include (a preliminary version of) the Space downstream domain, and the ecosystem of tools built upon the BoK to bring actors in the demand (industry) and offer (education) side of the sector closer together.