[miningmx.com] – MINING recruitment agencies have been trying to figure out why the sector struggles to attract young professionals to its ranks.
During the heyday of the supercycle, finding professional mining skills was a huge difficulty. In this context, young mining engineers could earn a fortune which, for South Africans, was often in foreign currencies.
Notwithstanding the slow-down in mining growth, recruitment agencies believe there’s still a dearth in new talent which has led one, a UK agency, founded by South African Will Coetzer, to conclude there is a “demographic timebomb’ at play in the sector.
Surveying some 912 mining professionals, Stratum International found that the skilled mining fraternity was an ageing population who were also retiring earlier than the previous generation creating what it termed “a burning platform’.
While mining companies have been trying to retain senior staff through various mechanisms such as pension incentives, flexibile working patterns, and extra benefits, they are still finding the business of attracting youth to their ranks difficult.
Of those polled, a mere 0.4% of senior level candidates, defined as reporting to the general manager or above in mining operations, or to project managers in project development, were aged between 25 and 34 years. Astonishingly, this is roughly the same proportion as those over 75 years.
Of the mining professionals surveyed, only 1% think the sector is properly prepared for “the demographic time bomb’ whilst a further 79% feel the industry is completely or “somewhat unprepared’. About 31% of the total surveyed worked in North America; 9% were in Southern Africa.
Only 28% of individuals surveyed have succession strategies in place but, paradoxically, only 29% of board executives in the survey believe the next generation of leaders will come from a pool of external candidates.
Human resources is not seen as the solution to attracting more young professionals to the sector as they want direct guidance from leaders rather than graduate programmes, concluded Stratum International.
Worldwide Recruitment Solutions (WRS), another recruitment agency, found from a global survey of over 5,300 job seekers that there’s “a war for talent’ in the sector. One of the deficits, according to WRS, is that not enough females is being attracted to the sector.
“While it’s common knowledge that the mining sector is a male dominated one, it’s a concern that nearly 94% of respondents were male,’ said Lucy Donald, a director of WRS. It also found the sector was ageing with over 32% of its survey’s respondents in the 35 to 44 years age category, and 30% in the 45 to 54 years category.
The gender bias is certainly discernable from a South African perspective. PwC found its its recently published Mine 2015 survey that of 37 JSE-listed companies polled, 82% of the board was male in 2014 compared to 83% in the previous year – hardly an improvement at all.
There’s also an interesting vogue for non-mining specialists taking up board representation. Of total board seats taken on JSE mining firms, 50% are drawn from the accounting and legal professions while only 16% are actually engineers, according to PwC.
Geologists, who represent the eternal optimists of the mining sector, comprise only 6% of all board directors, according to the survey.
This article first appeared in Finweek
