How Can We Close the Mining Industry Skills Gap

Today, I’m thinking about the skills and experience shortages we have in health and safety within the mining industry. Every site I visit, I talk to safety managers and safety superintendents who all face the same problem.

They can’t find people, or the people they find do not fill the full skill set that they’re looking for, implying that there is a gap. And how do they fill that gap?

Everyone’s struggling to work that out. This means that the safety manager and superintendent will have to take up the slack.

What are we doing as an industry to do anything different about this?

Not a lot. Our pathways into the mining industry have remained mostly unchanged. The certifications, tickets, and qualifications haven’t really changed at all.

The experience level of people filling roles is low, and it’s an issue that’s getting bigger and bigger, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Furthermore, the mining industry is struggling to attract younger people for a variety of different reasons, and we’re not doing anything to address this either.

So what can we do?

An idea that could help could help alleviate this problem. is linking with the professionals who are semi-retired or retired from the industry.

They have a lot of experience, and if there’s a way that we can connect the semi-retired and retired professionals with this younger generation or less experienced generation coming through, then is that a mechanism that we can solve or take a step forward?

We can top up this skill and experience gap in the less experienced employees. But also, it doesn’t have to take us two years, or three years to do this, as is often the case.

I’m really interested in what other people have to say about this and other ways in which they’ve solved that challenge. And here’s my musings for today.