Mining & workforce diversity
As much as minerals investment is on the upswing, it is not translating into a robust supply of the requisite skilled workers. The Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR) expects 51,000 retirements by 2025. Hiring is not getting any easier.
David Yokom of Queen’s University is keen not to downplay the hiring challenge, ‘but one opportunity to narrow the gap in human resources,’ he submits, ‘will be to target traditionally under-represented groups, such as women and immigrant workers. Actively engaging these groups in mining employment and education initiatives will be a key factor in counterbalancing the coming retirement problem.’
Attracting more women to mining
Women are significantly under-represented. Take Canada, for example, where mining is robust and gender imbalances are frequently subject to scrutiny. There, women account for just 17% of the workforce. So what’s to be done? Merely one promising model for diversity comes from private equity body Level 20, who are working to boost female representation in senior private equity roles to 20% with a programme of mentoring, networking and training. Plus, what gets measured gets managed, and in-depth studies such as ‘Addressing Systemic Barriers for Gender Equity in Mining’, partly funded by the government’s Status of Women Canada, bring research and numbers to the discussion. The project aims to identify the barriers and then remove them.
Are cultural minorities represented in mining?
The quick answer is no, not significantly, and Canada may serve here too as a reasonable proxy for industry-wide structural challenges. MiHR figures show that immigrant workers represent only 13% of that country’s mining workforce. Professor Yokom notes the contrast with the proportion of visible minorities enrolled in engineering degrees – 46.8%. MiHR’s recommendations to address that imbalance have been on offer since at least 2016 as they’ve pushed companies to focus on the following evidence-based guidelines:
- Tackle workplace barriers
- Build successful career paths
- Enhance workplace culture
- Keep researching barriers and cross-cultural differences
The skills shortage and looming retirement boom carry the threat of leaving hiring managers with unfilled posts. Widening the pool, however, to harness the skills of women and minority workers can change the story. Consulting mining leader for Deloitte, David Cormack, spoke to ABC News about the transformative power of pursuing a more diverse workforce:
At the big end of town those miners are already diversifying their boards, both from a gender and cultural perspective. They need the diversity of thought, the creativity, and the experience of different thinking by people from various backgrounds for this new age of mining.
