Mining Career Instability : Impacts on the Talent Pipeline
In a previous post we discussed the potential instability that a career in mining entails, how to make yourself more employable, and what the future might hold. In this blog post we discuss the knock on effect of that instability on the mining industry’s future.
The Past
In the metals boom following the global financial crisis of 2008, mining companies expanded rapidly to exploit increased metal prices driven by global growth.
In 2013, a slowdown in growth, including significantly less demand for iron from China, 2013 saw a severe downturn in global metal prices. To survive this return to this business as usual, mining companies conducted mass layoffs, primarily of geologists: the people that find and de-risk new orebodies to provide future growth of those companies, effectively the business development department. For a new (another?) generation of graduates, the mining industry no longer promised a steady or stable career, or offered a career at all.
“mining companies are experiencing a talent squeeze: 71 percent of mining leaders are finding the talent shortage is holding them back from delivering on production targets and strategic objectives.”
The Present
It is important to remember these 2013 - 2015 mass layoffs when we look at present day news articles. In 2023 against the backdrop of a green industrial revolution, we see soaring metal prices alongside huge demand from the mining industry for experienced workers, particularly those with 6-10 years experience - precisely those people who would be entering the workforce just as mining companies in general stopped hiring, and fired 1/3 of their geologists. Senior mining executives cite a shortage of skilled workers as holding them back from meeting targets - many of those workers that they made the decision to fire a decade ago.
The mass layoffs and resulting struggles of redundant geologists was a bad look for the industry. loss of faith in mining as a career choice, combined with the ever present anti-fossil fuel sentiment and associations with geology contributed to vastly reduced attendance on university courses from 2014 - 2020 (The Geological Society) and fewer geoscience graduates 3 years later from 2017 - 2023. Mining engineering and mineral processing also saw similar plummeting applications, making it an industry problem, not a geology problem.
This loss of faith in mining as a career would be a disaster for any industry on it’s own, however in 2023 the public and governments are waking up to the fact that ESG is a global critical issue: there is general pushback and vitriol for industries seen as non-green or dirty, of which O&G and Mining are the #1 and #2 contenders.
“...applications to geology programmes are down 9% (2018-2019) following a drop of 11% in 2017-2018. There were only 1,100 enrolments onto geology programmes in 2018-19, compared with 1,800 in 2014-2015...the trend looks set to continue”
The extractive industry is not only unappealing to those outside looking in, but now also to some of those already in it’s orbit. The double whammy of general anti-mining sentiment from those opposed to ‘dirty industry’, and those dissuaded from a career in mining due to it’s inherent boom and bust instability has possibly dissuaded new people from entering the industry, but also removed a typical pipeline for graduates - the children of those in the industry.
Children often follow in parents footsteps career wise, having grown up and likely been fascinated by their parents work - The children of Physical scientists are 456x more likely to become physical scientists themselves. The 2013 culling of geologists and other mining professionals permanently removed many proponents for that field, from that field and into other careers for the best part of a decade. Many have not returned (perhaps most, if the vacancies from the 2013 layoffs cannot be filled in 2023), and the children of those former geologists are now probably lost to the industry. Not only did the industry lay off most of it’s business development department, it also laid off advocates for that field of study and career choice, giving them the trifold future problems of:
Not enough new discoveries (as they fired the exploration department)
Not enough skilled explorers to make new discoveries (as they fired the exploration department)
A diminishing pipeline of professionals (as they showed that the career is unstable, putting many people off, and the children of former mining professionals being removed from the pool of candidates)
Universities since the 1980’s have seen decreased public funding and a greater requirement to bring in funding from research grants, tuition fees and rental income. This more business like approach, as opposed to the traditional acadmic approach, has resulted in unprofitable courses (i.e. those with low demand) being reduced or cut entirely, with the resulting staff layoffs. This is not a problem unique to mining specific courses such as mining engineering, but is symptomatic of geoscience as a whole. In the 1990’s the UK produced 300 mining engineers per year. In 2020, The University of Exeter closed down the last Mining Engineering course in the UK. Great Britain, with it’s several thousand year mining history, has now begun to train zero graduate miners since 2020. Three years later, a rising demand for metals and a UK government taking action on trying to secure metals, and there is still no undergraduate minining engineering course available in the UK. This is not a UK specific trend, but also seen in mining heavy countries like Australia, where the West Australia School of Mines has been under threat since at least 2010. The 2010-2012 boom saw a resurgence in applications in the UK (witnessed myself as undergraduate numbers at CSM swelled), followed by another slump as the crash hit.
The Future
Increased environmental and social governance (ESG) is a driver for many modern mining activities to become more sustainable, however this sustainability should not be restricted only to the environment, or the hiring of a diverse workforce, but also related to the retraining of that workforce. Laying off significant portions of your skilled workers every decade is not smart, nor is it sustainable as we see today.
Would today’s manpower crisis exist if employers had acted more sustainably and with a long term view in 2013, trying to smooth out the fluctuations rather than being led by the nose by them? Possibly. Will mining companies learn from this and try to increase career stability in mining, and promote it as stable and rewarding to attract top candidates? Hopefully, however we’ve not seen it yet. It may be that ESG advocates need to factor worker retention into industry guidelines to ensure the future health and sustained, sustainable growth of the extractives industry.
Walking away from site.
Final Thoughts
As we can clearly see that there is a background trend of declining student numbers in the mineral resource, we cannot blame the 2013 mass layoffs entirely for the current talent situation (or lack thereof). This bleeding of talent from the extraction fields is nothing new however, we see that universities have been raising the alarm and warning industry for over a decade, however little has been done to stem the leak until it was too late, and many senior mining managers exclaimed that this was an outrage and no one could have predicted this.
Not only were professionals leaking out of the industry, but organisations then decided to accelerate this downward trend by voluntarily removing their talent en-masee in 2013, presumably under the assumption that they could rehire them in the future at the drop of a hat as they had done in the past. The world has changed significantly since the 1980’s. The days where a non-college educated person can support a family of five on a single wage are gone, seemingly never to return. People cannot sit around waiting for mining companies to call them, and won’t encourage others to work in an industry that drops them. Nor do outsiders wish to work within an industry with such a reputation.
In the next post, I’ll look at some ways in which the mining industry can try to reverse this trend and encourage a new generation of professionals into the field.
Cover image from Bloomberg.
For the background to this blog entry, please check out the previous post: Navigating Career Stability in Mining