Global Careers Fair brings together top science organisations

In early October, the SKAO joined forces with fellow intergovernmental organisations CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA) and ITER in a virtual careers fair aimed at attracting candidates from all over the world.

The event was a key part of the work that the SKAO is doing to build our employment brand globally. This allowed us to showcase opportunities in engineering and computing across the Observatory as well as enabling us to provide insight into what it is like to work for the SKAO.

The candidates had the chance to engage in a livestream broadcast by one of our colleagues and speak directly to current staff who volunteered to have one-to-one chats via instant messaging software during the four-hour event.

The SKAO booth highlighted roles for radio frequency engineers, electrical, electronic, mechanical and telecommunications engineers, system engineers, software developers and UX specialists, with candidates encouraged to register their interest in anticipation of the roles going live in the coming months. The Observatory’s presence at the event was organised by the Human Resources team, supported by colleagues in Engineering, Software and Communications.

“We were delighted to be part of this event along with CERN, ESA and ITER.” says Fiona Davenport, SKAO Head of Human Resources, “By teaming up in this way we have been able to reach a wide pool of diverse candidates to enable us to build our future candidate pipeline.”

“The SKAO’s recruitment activity is growing rapidly now and many of the roles are highly specialised, so events like this enable us to target our efforts in a way that will have the most impact. Our staff spoke to more than 100 interested people on the day, and many signed up to join our candidate pool for future alerts to opportunities.

As a new IGO this was the first time we have taken part in such an event and we will now review feedback as we look to be part of similar events in future.”

By the SKAO HR Team