Our team and mission

This position is based at the ESA HQ – Paris, France

Our department is responsible for elaborating and implementing the agency’s industrial policy, for defining and implementing the geographical return and industrial audit policies, for fostering the relations between industry and the agency and for supporting the successful accession of new member and cooperating states.

SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) and start-ups play an ever-increasing role in the activities of ESA and the industrial landscape of its Member States. Today they represent about 30% of the companies contracted by the Agency and are important contributors of innovation for ESA Programmes. The SME Section of the Department implements the ESA SME Industrial Policy with the objective to facilitate both the introduction and the sustainable involvement of SMEs in the activities of the Agency and to support their introduction into the industrial space supply chain. To this end the SME Office performs a variety of activities also including analyses concerning the involvement of SME in the Agencies activities and their economic and financial characteristics as well as the evolution of the SME landscape.

* SME are defined as companies having a staff headcount <250, annual turnover ≤ 50M€ or a balance sheet total ≤ 43M€, see Recommendation of the European Commission 2003/361/EC of 6 May 2003

For further information visit our web site: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity for the internship

Topic: Economic analysis and characterization of space SME

In the context of elaborating and implementing the Agency’s industrial policy it is important for ESA to maintain an in-depth understanding of the space industry and its characteristics. The focus of the here concerned activity is to contribute to the mapping and characterization of the European space SME community. This concerns in particular statistical analyses of the economic and financial characteristics of European space SME.

To this end a variety of available data sources of the Agency comprising of programmatic, financial, and economical data (current and historic) concerning the European space industry working with ESA shall be exploited for the analyses (Note that access to the data and publication may be subject to a non-disclosure agreement). The analyses shall contribute to the establishment of an exhaustive data collection of relevant economic and financial characteristics space SME community and/or conceiving and performing further in depths studies of industrial policy relevance with the available data and shall contribute to the improvement of the Agency’s statistical toolset. The precise scope and content of the specific analyses to be performed during the period of the internship can be agreed with you in line with your research interests.

You will be supported by the SME Office and other services of the Department.

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward Thinking

Education

You must have student status and be enrolled at university for the entire duration of the internship. You should preferably be in your final or second to last year of a university course at master’s level in a technical or scientific discipline.

Additional requirements

The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another Member State language would be an asset.

Additional Requirements:

• Economics, Statistics, Econometrics
• The activity requires the handling of large datasets
• Proficiency with MS-Excel is required and experience with data analysis and visualization tools such as Tableau and Power-BI would be an asset