CIPD’s 2026 Resourcing and Talent Planning report found that only 16% of organisations in the UK planned their workforce more than two years ahead and 46% still approached recruitment on an ad hoc basis. This is even when 52% of organisations reported increased competition for qualified talent. This also seems to be a common factor within the space sector. A new contract is signed. Investment lands. A manufacturing facility gets the green light. Then comes the question: “How

The engineer you need might be in Toulouse. Or Munich. Or Bangalore. If your hiring strategy only reaches people within commuting distance of your office, you are competing for talent with one hand tied behind your back. Why International Hiring Matters for the Global Space Industry The space sector has always been international. Spacecraft programmes span multiple countries. Supply chains cross borders. Launch services operate from sites on six continents. Yet many space sta

Three quarters of employee departures are preventable. That means most of the engineers who left your startup did not have to leave. Something in the environment pushed them out, and that something was usually visible months before they handed in their notice. The Engineer Retention Problem That Starts at Hiring Most founders treat retention as a separate problem from recruitment. Hiring is one function. Keeping people is another. In practice, they are the same system. The pr

Why rejecting experienced engineers could slow the next generation of missions Why Dismissing Engineers from Large Space Primes Is Costing You Talent “They’re a good systems engineer, but they’ve only worked at a prime.” I hear versions of this more often than I should. A candidate has spent years solving difficult spacecraft problems, perhaps on a GEO programme at Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin. Yet the moment a smallsat company sees the emp

A quarter of the space workforce is nearing retirement age. Only 7% is under 25. That is not simply a hiring problem. It is a structural challenge for an industry trying to scale at unprecedented speed. Why the Space Industry Workforce Gap Is Getting Worse The Space Foundation's CEO put it plainly in 2026: "That is not a sustainable path." And the numbers back it up. Around 25% of the global space workforce is approaching retirement while the industry is scaling faster than a

European space investment grew by more than 600% in the first half of 2026. The talent pool did not grow with it, and location-based hiring policies are making it even smaller. Why the European Space Industry Talent Shortage Is Getting Worse Across Europe in H1 2026, €2.9 billion was raised across 33 funding rounds involving 30 companies. And many of those companies are looking for exactly the same talent. Systems Engineers. Product Assurance. AIT. RF. GNC. Flight Dynamics. S

Most startup hiring advice is written for SaaS companies. Hire an engineer, then a marketer, then a salesperson. Scale the go-to-market machine. That playbook does not apply to deep tech. If you are building satellites, propulsion systems, Earth observation platforms, or space hardware, your first 10 hires look fundamentally different because you are building physical systems with long development cycles, specialised engineering requirements, and regulatory constraints that s

This is the story of a single engagement that lasted over a decade. It started with a pre-revenue satellite company that had 12 employees and an ambitious plan to build a new operator from the ground up. It ended with a publicly listed international space company valued at approximately $1.8 billion at IPO, with more than 300 people. I was involved at both ends of that journey and at several points between. This is what that looked like in practice. The Starting Point and Why

You know you need help with hiring. You have looked at recruitment agencies, considered hiring a full-time Head of Talent, and now someone has mentioned the retainer model. It sounds interesting but also vague. What exactly are you paying for? What happens between hires? And how do you know whether it is working? These are the questions I get most often from founders and HR leaders before they engage with a talent advisor. They are good questions, and the fact that most advis

SpaceX just announced another wave of hiring. Amazon Leo (formally known as project kuiper) is scaling up. Defence primes are offering retention packages that look more like ransom payments. And you are sitting in a 40-person space startup trying to hire a systems engineer who has actually seen a full spacecraft programme from requirements through to operations. Welcome to deep tech recruitment in 2026. I have worked in this space for over 25 years, helping companies across s