Launched: April 2025
The challenge
The Iberian Peninsula faces major societal challenges. Portugal and Spain are some of the countries that have ageing populations, leading to strained public resources and a shortage of qualified workers. This has increased competition for talent across various sectors.
This lack of talent is felt intensely in the aerospace and defence (ASD) sector. Moreover, the sector laid off a large proportion of its employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of whom moved onto other sectors and did not return to ASD.
Added to these pressures, Spain and Portugal are above the unemployment rate average (6%) for the EU27: Spain is the country with the highest unemployment rate in the EU (12%) and Portugal is above average (6.7%) (Eurostat, 2024). The same generally applies to the countries’ youth unemployment. However, the main challenge is the relatively low competitiveness of salaries in the Iberian Peninsula, which drives both local and international talent to relocate to regions with a more established industry and higher wages.
There is also a significant gender gap in the ASD sector. While women of working age make up more than half of the population, they represent only around 20% of the workforce in most ASD occupations across Europe, according to the latest reports from ASD/Eurostat on the sector.
The ambition
The ‘Regional-Scale Skills Partnership (RSP) for an Iberian-Based Ecosystem towards Upskilling/Reskilling in ASD’ (RISE-ASD) aims to tackle these challenges by building on the Pact for Skills’ collaborations and commitment to reskilling and upskilling.
To do so, the RSP will provide information, recommend actions and organise an open forum for dissemination and dialogue to meet common objectives. This RSP aims to work in synergy with the existing Pact for Skills Large-Scale Partnership (LSP) in ASD ecosystem.
RISE-ASD aims to enhance skills development in the Iberian Peninsula for ASD by involving all partners in this sector to tackle skills shortages for this sector in the Iberian labour market.
RISE-ASD aims to provide a bigger talent pool to an up-and-coming Iberian ASD sector and thus to support the economic growth and consolidation of the industry.
Part of its strategy is to raise awareness of the variety of job roles in ASD beyond pilot, astronaut or armed forces positions by sharing opportunities to students and involving multiple stakeholders in an industry, education/training, research, governance and society ecosystem.
RISE-ASD aims to create synergies with LSPs in the ASD ecosystem, like ‘ASD’ and the ‘SPACE4GEO’, LSPs, concluded Erasmus Blueprint projects like ‘Eo4Geo’ and ‘ASSETS+’, and contribute to ongoing Erasmus+ blueprint alliances under the Pact, like ‘SpaceSUITE’.
RISE-ASD will have a regional focus, creating and consolidating an Iberian network around skills and opportunities for the ASD ecosystem, and providing credible information to support members’ decisions.
The commitments
Through a holistic approach, the RISE-ASD commits to the following actions:
- Create a diverse reskilling/upskilling community for the ASD ecosystem.
- Disseminate the ecosystem and its opportunities.
- Conduct joint reskilling/upskilling training.
- Create an ‘HR Barometer’ to harmonise job profiles at regional level, sharing good practices and working as an observatory for transferable skills to-and-from neighbouring sectors to increase competitiveness.
- Create common events/missions about skills and reskilling/upskilling to deepen members’ knowledge of opportunities.
RISE-ASD also commits to the following actions to improve the reskilling/upskilling processes:
- Involve a large and diverse network of relevant Iberian stakeholders towards creating reskilling/upskilling concepts and processes to develop common solutions.
- Provide useful information to help inform reskilling/upskilling processes (as in the HR Barometer or RSP publications).
- Enable contact between current/future workers and organisations, helping the uptake of talent by the ASD sector, useful for students and those working in complementary sectors.
- In line with the overall ambition of the ASD ecosystem in the Pact for skills, contribute to the objective of up/reskilling 6% of the total ASD workforce and 30% by 2030 in the Iberian Peninsula.
Learn more about the Regional Skills Partnership for Upskilling the Iberian Peninsula’s aerospace and defence sector here.
