EDUCATION
????
Feast turns to famine
for mining graduates
Five years ago, few would argue that mining engineering was one of the hottest tickets for new university students,
with a skills-starved mining industry desperate for recruits. But now, all that may have changed, and the consequences
could be severe in years to come, AJM’s Oliver Probert reports.
M
ining engineering graduates could be the hidden victims of
the mining slowdown, and that
could cause serious problems down the track
for the industry as a whole, according to a
number of pre-eminent mining educators.
One of those educators, the head of the
University of New South Wales’ School of
Mining Engineering, Bruce Hebblewhite,
says that up until the start of 2013, the
industry was telling the education sector
that not enough mining engineers were being
produced.
But since then, he says, there have been too
many new graduates in the labour market.
Statistics shown by Hebblewhite at a conference in the Hunter Valley in October 2013
suggest that after several years of demand
exceeding supply of new labour in the mining
engineering sector, that worm has now turned,
and there is now an oversupply of labour in
the Australian market.
What that’s leading to, Hebblewhite
explained, is a large number of qualified
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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2014
mining engineers – many of whom enrolled in
their courses five years ago due to the allure
of a near-certain, well-paid job at the end of
their degree – who can’t find work.
“All we know is that across the country,
2013 graduates are not being offered enough
jobs, so demand has fallen below the supply
level,” Hebblewhite said in his presentation.
A large part of Hebblewhite’s frustration
comes from the fact that, as the mining boom
sounded, the industry struggled to find enough
qualified engineers to suit its needs, and
turned to the education sector for help.
“During the period 2000-2006, the university sector was criticised for not delivering
enough graduates, and not responding to the
needs of the industry,” he said in October.
Since that period, he said, “the providers, and
MEA in particular, have kept their side of the
bargain, in delivering what was asked for.”
MEA is Mining Education Australia, a
collaborative venture formed in 2004,
following the 1998 paper Back from the Brink
– Reshaping Minerals Tertiary Education.
It comprises the University of Adelaide,
the University of New South Wales, the
University of Queensland, and Curtin
University. It is supported by the Minerals
Council of Australia, membership of which
includes 48 of Australia’s mining and mining
services companies.
MEA was set up to address both the quality
and quantity of mining engineering graduates,
and claims responsibility for 85% of mining
graduates since 2007.
But after all the good work Hebblewhite
said the MEA has done, his concern now is
that as graduates struggle to find jobs, there
will be less potential students willing to enter
into mining degrees, and current graduates
could seek work overseas, or in other sectors.
“You cannot turn the graduate tap off, and
expect to be able to turn it back on as soon as
things pick up, and have an instant flow of
graduates again,” Hebblewhite said. “In four
years’ time, industry will be knocking our
doors down demanding graduates, but where
will they be?”
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF MINING
EDUCATION
Professor Peter Dowd is MEA’s executive
director, as well as a professor of mining engineering at the University of Adelaide. He
spoke with AJM, and suggested that the problem of an oversupply of graduates in the mining sector was perhaps being overplayed by
his colleagues.
“It’s difficult to tell … probably by around
February, March [2014], we’d be able to do a
reasonable census of who’s employed, and
who’s unemployed in mining,” he explained.
He said that in the most recent statistics,
from 2012 graduates, mining courses resulted
in the equal-highest employment rate for any
discipline, along with medicine.
“For the year ending 31st of December,
2012 … 93.9% [of graduates] were in full
time employment, 5.1% were seeking full
time employment and were not working, and
1% were seeking full time employment and
working part time.
“Now, I imagine, with what’s happened
over the past 12 months since then the rates
would go down,” he added. “But we won’t
have official rates for another few months.”
Dowd said it may be too early to suggest
that a lower amount of graduates in future
years would have a negative impact on the
industry, should it return to a growth period.
“Over the past eight, nine years, we’ve
gone through unprecedented growth in mining,” he explained. “Nobody would have ever
predicted that it would increase by this
amount, so we were struggling to produce
enough graduates to satisfy industry demand.”
Because of this high, Dowd said, it’s hard
to be sure that the boom was reflective of the
amount of growth the industry would see in
the future as part of a ‘cycle’, like the one
Hebblewhite is suggesting.
“You couldn’t actually say that it’s gone
into a cycle again because it’s coming off an
all-time high, so I think it’s a slowdown,”
Dowd explained.
“Every indication is that it’s going to pick
up again, but how soon, nobody knows. I
agree that it has in the past been cyclical,
but we’ve been out of that cycle for getting on
ten years.”
One person, however, who shares
Hebblewhite’s concerns about a cyclical
return to an undersupply of graduate labour is
Peter Knights, head of the mining division at
the University of Queensland’s School of
Mechanical & Mining Engineering.
“We’ve seen a fundamental reversal of the
supply and demand [in the graduate labour
market],” Knights told AJM. “It’s driven by
the reversal of the commodities market.”
Knights estimates 30% of his graduates
find graduate employment, while just 20%
of his students find vocational employment
(i.e. work experience). During the peak of the
mining boom, he said, both of those figures
would have been 100%.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF MINING
And the really scary thing, he said, is that of
that 30% of graduates finding graduate work,
more and more are not being kept on by their
employer once their initial contract finishes.
He said this could have a serious impact
on mining’s labour market in the future.
“There needs to be a commitment to
developing young talent,” Knights said.
“If the mining companies stick with all the
old dogs through the down periods, they
will struggle to find talent when the industry
picks up again.”
Knights urged Australian miners to ensure
they continue to employ new graduates, even
through leaner times.
“The mining industry is cyclical,” he said.
“When it takes off again we will all be in a
worse off position.”
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EDUCATION
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One key driver of concern for both
Knights and Hebblewhite is a lack of high
school graduates putting mining engineering
courses as their first preference for university
placement.
Hebblewhite said that first preferences
for UNSW’s course in 2014 were 54% lower
than they were a year earlier. The University
of Adelaide’s were down 15%, as well,
according to Dowd.
“[High school students] read the media
stories and are turned away in droves, under
the impression that the mining boom is over,
so there is no career in the mining industry,”
Hebblewhite said. “They also hear about no
industry scholarships available, so maybe the
industry has no need for graduates.”
The irony of this issue is that it was media
stories and industry scholarships that led
droves of high school students to put mining
engineering courses as their top preference
five years ago – the same students who are
now, as graduates, struggling to find work
in the sector.
Matthew Aikins is just one of those
students.
Having enrolled in a double degree in
Mining Engineering and Science at UNSW
in 2008, he finished last year with first class
honours. In his final semester he earned
three high distinctions and two distinctions
in his five subjects.
But Aikins says he’s been unable to find
any work in the industry since finishing his
degree, and it’s not for a lack of trying.
“I started applying for jobs [in 2012] at
the end of my engineering degree – so I still
had one year left in the science degree,”
Aikins explains.
He says he’s applied for just about every
suitable job he’s seen, including those in other
states, but hasn’t yet been successful. Aikins
is not sure exactly how many jobs he’s
applied for, but estimates that “it’d be easily
30 plus.”
He won’t disclose which company he feels
he came closest to being successful with, but
says with “one of the really big Australian
companies … I got to the video interview
stage [of the recruitment process].”
The next closest, he adds, was “one of
the coal mining companies operating out of
NSW … I got to the final interview stage
there, where they were originally offering up
to eight positions, and ended up cutting it
down to offer only one position.
“I think there were about 13 to 20 of us
there, interviewing for the role. But it was just
a fact that circumstances at that time dictated
that the company wasn’t able to offer that
many positions.”
Aikins believes the limited number of
roles available to graduates is making it hard
for people like him to be successful in the
recruitment process, and he thinks he has a
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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2014
The future mining engineer
s part of his presentation in the Hunter
Valley last October, Bruce Hebblewhite,
head of the University of New South
Wales’ School of Mining Engineering, gave
an outline of the kind of mining engineer his
school was trying to create.
A
“It is important to continually review education
programs to ensure education curricula
match desired industry graduate attributes,”
his presentation said.
In the future, he explained, these attributes
could include:
• good enabling scientific principles and
engineering design skills
• sound technical mining engineering knowledge
• ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity
in design and management
• good communication skills at all levels
• understanding of risk assessment principles
and management
• ability to live and work in remote, non-urban
locations
• capable of dealing with, and adaptive to,
change
• commitment to value-adding and continuous
improvement
• understanding the principles of remote control
and automation, as applied to mining systems;
and ability to manage specialist staff in these
and related IT fields
• thorough understanding of, and commitment
to Health, Safety, Environment and Community
principles; cultural responsibilities; and their
implications for sustainable mining practices
• global consciousness and awareness in terms
of all of above attributes – including
development of indigenous human resources
and related cultural considerations; plus
multi-lingual communication skills
solid grasp on why graduate positions are so
few and far between.
“The minerals industry is driven by largescale investment,” he says. “When you get
any sort of downturn, the immediate thing
that mining companies look to do is to cut
any non-essential personnel, as well as cut off
any sort of acquisition, or hiring, of new
personnel.
“From last year, the impression I got was
unless you were on a university scholarship
[from a mining company], it was quite hard
to get any graduate employment, and that
was just a factor of companies taking on
those they were contracted to take on, and
nothing more.”
Aikins is in agreement with Peter Knights
when he said that mining companies need to
continue to hire new graduates, not just retain
older employees, but understands why older
employees are getting the preference ahead
of new graduates at times.
“It depends on how quickly you want a
return on your investment,” Aikins says.
“Are you looking to get an operation up and
running at a certain level instantly, or are
you looking to staff for the longer term?
“A lot of companies got rid of what they
termed as ‘non-essential personnel’ during
the last couple of years, and now that the
financial markets have stabilised a bit, they’re
re-evaluating the number of people that they
cut initially.
“In order to get back to any sort of profitable production, they tend towards re-hiring
someone who doesn’t need a lot of training.”
But he says for longer term projects, “it
would make sense to hire someone who’s
younger, just for the fact that you’re not
looking to get a huge amount of production
out of that operation now, you’re looking to
set it up for some time in the future.
“That would hold a graduate in incredibly
good stead in the future, and ultimately hold
the business in incredibly good stead in the
long term.”
Aikins says that if he continues to be
unsuccessful in his attempts to find work in
the Australian mining sector, he will be forced
to look for work in a different sector, such as
finance, or in the mining sector overseas.
If more and more graduates start thinking
the same way, that could be cause for even
more concern for the future of the mining
industry.
Hebblewhite, under whom Aikins studied
at UNSW, said late last year that the industry
needs to work together to maintain a steady
stream of new positions for mining graduates,
and to avoid a lack of qualified labour in
the future.
“Unless there is a major change in real,
tangible commitment, there is a real risk
that the graduate supply, when the industry
picks up again, will not be sufficient, and
industry will once again be in trouble,”
Hebblewhite said.
“Unless industry adopts a long-term strategic view of education support and graduate
recruitment, they will never solve the problem
of adequate graduate supply.”
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AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF MINING