The Art of the Pivot: Translating Your Experience for the Space Sector

If you look at job descriptions in the space sector, it’s easy to feel excluded. You see requirements for "Orbital Mechanics," "Radiation Hardening," or "ECSS Standards," and you might assume the door is closed unless you have an aerospace degree.

But the reality of the European space sector has changed. As companies shift from building one custom satellite every five years to manufacturing hundreds of units annually, the talent pool must widen.

The industry doesn't just need rocket scientists anymore. It needs people who know how to build reliable code, manage complex supply chains, and scale infrastructure.

The challenge is that space recruiters and non-space candidates often speak different languages. To break in, you don't need to change your skills—you need to change how you describe them.

1. The Automotive Pivot: From "Cars" to "Constellations"

The modern space industry is obsessed with "serial production." For decades, satellites were hand-crafted prototypes. Now, companies like Airbus (OneWeb) or Rivada are trying to build satellites like cars.

If you are an Automotive Engineer, you possess a skillset that traditional aerospace engineers often lack: the ability to design for mass manufacture.

How to reframe it: Recruiters aren't looking for "chassis design"; they are looking for reliability and scalability.

• Instead of: "Managed the assembly line for the VW Golf."
• Try: "Experience managing serial production lines and optimising Assembly, Integration, and Test (AIT) workflows for high-volume hardware."
• The Key Bridge: Mention your experience with ISO 26262 (Functional Safety). It is the automotive cousin of the space industry’s ECSS-Q standards. Proving you can work within a strict regulatory framework is half the battle.

2. The FinTech Pivot: From "High Frequency" to "Flight Software"

A satellite is essentially a remote server that you cannot reboot. If the software crashes during a critical manoeuvre, the hardware is lost.

This creates a natural crossover with FinTech and MedTech. If you have written code for high-frequency trading or payment gateways, you already understand the two pillars of flight software: Determinism and Fault Tolerance.

How to reframe it: Space companies are skeptical of "Move Fast and Break Things" developers. They want defensive coders.

• Instead of: "Full-stack developer for a banking app."
• Try: "Specialised in high-reliability, low-latency systems. Experienced in writing fault-tolerant code for transaction-critical environments."
• The Key Bridge: Highlight your discipline. Mention rigorous code reviews, static analysis, and memory management. Show them you understand that a bug in production has catastrophic consequences.

3. The Web Pivot: From "SaaS" to "Ground Segment"

While "Flight Software" is specialised, "Ground Software" is pure modern tech. This is the code that runs on Earth to schedule satellite passes, process imagery, and deliver data to customers.

Here, the space industry is playing catch-up with the tech world. They are desperate for modern Cloud and DevOps practices.

How to reframe it: You don't need to know orbital dynamics; you need to know how to handle data.

• Instead of: "Built a dashboard for an e-commerce site."
• Try: "Architected scalable cloud-native platforms for processing and visualising large datasets. Experienced with AWS/Azure and Kubernetes for automated deployment."
• The Key Bridge: Treat the satellite as just another IoT device. You are building the API that interacts with it.

The "Translation" Checklist

When updating your CV/LinkedIn, focus on the attributes of your work rather than the product.

1. Abstract the Product: If you built a fuel pump, you built a "safety-critical fluid system." If you built a trading algo, you built a "real-time, deterministic event processor."
2. Highlight Constraints: Space is hard because of constraints (power, thermal, bandwidth). Show examples where you delivered under strict technical limitations.
3. Show the Passion: This is the tie-breaker. If you have zero professional space experience, your "Projects" section needs to do the heavy lifting. A personal project involving a Raspberry Pi, a Software Defined Radio (SDR), or an open-source contribution to a space library (like Poliastro) proves you are genuinely interested.

Summary

You are not asking for a favour; you are offering a solution. The space industry has solved the "how do we get to orbit" problem. Now they are trying to solve the "how do we scale" problem.

That is likely a problem you have already solved on Earth.

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