In 2022, the lack of talent was described by Blue Origins’ Brent Sherwood as the “biggest challenge” facing the space industry. And as more countries develop their own space programmes, the shortage becomes more acute.
Five years after the creation of the Luxembourg Space Agency, many of the startups and scaleups that were established in Luxembourg are looking to scale fast.
When Mateusz Pondel saw the need he pivoted the focus of his recruitment firm to serve this community, first taking on an Earth observation firm seeking a senior researcher. “There is not enough talent in Luxembourg to fill the growing sector,” said Pondel, adding: “There are, of course, movements between companies but in terms of growth, it’s not enough.”
Salary expectations
The solution for most space firms has been to recruit outside of the country, to Eastern Europe, for example. However, this is no panacea.
On the one hand, pint-sized Luxembourg is competing with better-known places such as Toulouse, Northern Italy and Switzerland, not to mention the US. On the other hand, the cost of housing is relatively high in Luxembourg. According to Pondel, once candidates see the cost of living in Luxembourg, they have second thoughts. “It eats into the salary,” the recruiter explained. “I had cases where we were very close to finding the right person to but at the end of the process, they decided not to relocate because the company was not able to meet their salary expectations.”
“There is not enough talent in Luxembourg to fill the growing sector.”
Mateusz Pondel, Managing Partner of Aqteev
It is a familiar experience for Redwire general manager for Luxembourg Jaroslaw Jaworski. To compete with the US and other European space hubs, he reckoned that more could be done to raise awareness abroad about Luxembourg as an attractive place for international people to live. What is more, he suggested that relatively speaking, the cost of living is not as dire as everyone suggests
His main pain point is that salary expectations are distorted by the high salaries commanded by the financial sector. Annual gross salaries in the Luxembourg private space sector can vary between €55K and €100K, depending on experience and expertise. Pondel said that in the past some of the bigger employers have compromised and offered more money to secure staff and meet project deadlines. But, Jaworski warned that these kinds of compromises are risky for the sector. He said: “We need to be careful, even when we are hiring senior engineers, to not quickly pay high salaries because we would experience inflation of salaries and as a result, we will stop being competitive on the global market.”
One potential solution mooted by Jaworski would be to create a specific tax regime for space sector skills, with a ceiling on the number of staff benefiting from the scheme and the number of years it would apply for. He said: “If the government could give tax benefits to employees that are working for space entities for the first five years, that would be an amazing tool to solve a lot of our problems.”
“Luxembourg is seen as an expensive space. It’s not necessarily so expensive, if you look at the cost of living on the west coast of the US.”
Jaroslaw Jaworski, Managing Director of Redwire Space Europe
Experience & Qualifications
According to Pondel, in some cases to fill a role quickly employers have relaxed the level of experience or qualifications required from candidates. It may be they started out looking for a PhD with ten years of experience, but hired someone with a Master’s or a Bachelor’s and spent more time on internal training.
If employers are willing to compromise, there are two higher education institutions close by that can serve as a stepping stone to the ecosystem. The International Space University, headquartered in Strasbourg, has a 5,400-strong alumni network in 110 countries. Closer to home, the University of Luxembourg facilitates the positioning of funded doctoral students working part-time within private companies as part of its SpaceR force (in aerial and space robotics).
In 2019, it launched a two-year Interdisciplinary Space Masters, adding a new cohort of space talent. Jaroslaw believed that it could do even more. “It would be extremely beneficial for everyone if the university had a bachelor degree in very traditional areas, for example, software electronics or mechanical engineering,” he said, adding: “After just three-and-a-half years they would be excellent candidates to join us in a junior position and learn. Sometimes having three juniors can replace someone who is at a middle level.”
Employers willing to invest in training could also consider hiring candidates from manufacturing and heavy industries which have synergies with space engineering. “When they think about space, they think of rocket science and science fiction. They could be great candidates but they don’t know that,” said Jaworski, adding: “I think our job is to educate people in Luxembourg that this is actually an opportunity.”
Extending Geographic Reach
Hiring from abroad is the main growth vector for Luxembourg’s space ecosystem. In some instances, candidates are being hired from the greater region. The advantages being that they face little disruption to their home life, they know the country and can benefit from the commuter infrastructure already in place. Pondel said he focuses his talent search on Europe. Widening the geographic scope would expand the candidate pool but it creates new challenges. Jaworkski said he’d like to hire more space engineers from Turkey and India, for instance.
“All these countries that have strong defense space and ideation industry and for them, taking a risk and moving to Luxembourg is very attractive because after five years of working there, they can apply for a European passport,” he said. But the process of obtaining a work permit is too slow for the short timeframes required to scale a project. He added: “A lot of good people that wanted to move here took six months to get it and we lost them. Right now we are double thinking since we cannot have a person immediately we need to think six months ahead.” He’d like to see Luxembourg introduce a fast-track programme for work permit stream for the space sector to hire talent faster.
Ecosystem consultation
The Luxembourg Space Agency (LSA) and economy ministry are aware of the challenges and have examined potential solutions, including a trial accommodation linked to the Space Campus. LSA managing director Marc Serres said: “[Talent] is something we will try to address in the framework of the space campus to see if we can find ways to offer easy ways to have people coming to Luxembourg, at least in the beginning,” he said.
“At the end of the day we cannot solve the issue of the pricing of the housing in Luxembourg at our level.”
Marc Serres, LSA’s CEO
The LSA is meanwhile consulting with the Space Generation Advisory Council, a non-governmental organisation and professional network for students and young space professionals, to receive their recommendations on hiring space talent.
“We are now considering their inputs,” said Serres. “It’s a topic for which we need partners. So, we are exploring who we could work with.”
One growing partnership is with the national employment agency Adem. In 2023, LSA and Adem will organise an event to collect feedback from the ecosystem.
“We know we need to do something. We have a few ideas and we now need to check that this is exactly what our ecosystem needs,” added Serres.
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
