There is lots happening in the UK Space Industry and for once we are (collectively) in the news a lot – not always positively, mind.
And at Plastron, we are seeing a clear ramping up of activity.
Recently we were present at the UKSA Ignite conference in the Skills Zone to promote our unique skills development expertise in the UK space sector. We were part of the UK Space Agency stand alongside others involved in skills including UK Students for the Development of Space (UKSEDS). As well as being a great opportunity to catch up with others (including colleagues from UKSpace, Satellite Applications Catapult, UK Space Agency and Southampton University) to find out what’s going on with them, we were promoting the importance of our safety engineering skills programmes to students and academics, many of whom are not aware of our work. We also had the chance to promote our ESA-BIC supported Product Development Support Platform – where we are developing a digital platform to mitigate risk in space hardware research and development. The risk model behind the tool recently attracted attention from NASA engineering management at the IEEE conference in Colorado.
Then last week, we participated in a workshop for the Plymouth & South Devon Freeport alongside Satellite Applications Catapult Skills Lead, Kathie Bowden.
It became clear that there are similar issues for the maritime industry as we are seeing in the space sector in terms of onboarding new, young professionals with a lack of practical skills.
Some maritime skills development already benefits from the advanced immersive technology capabilities available in the SW, which is a capability Plastron has been looking at over the past 6 months.
We also discussed transferable skills, how to align sector growth, skills needs and new technology supply chains as well as identifying how to factor in the multitude of career entry points with the necessary ease of access and relevant upskilling. Insights gained from the session have helped validate a safety skills programme we are currently defining and which we intend to launch later this year.
This is all important and positive as Plastron Training Ltd is fundamentally a business focused on vocational and practical skills development in safety engineering for the incumbent and incoming space sector workforce. As such we feel we have a really significant role to play in the development of people in the sector.
We currently run two significant programmes to help with this:
- Our skills development five-day training course has seen over 250 people, mostly students upskilled in hazardous safety engineering
- Our software platform for managing risk in product R&D has been supported by SPRINT and European Space Agency Business Incubation Sector over the past 18 months.
If you’d like to find out more find us on Linked In.