With mining engineers in high demand, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the Western Australian School of Mines have joined forces to form Mining Education Australia.
One outcome of the collaboration is that mining engineering students will be taught from a national curriculum in the third and fourth years.
MEA is the first fruit of a program that started in 1998 when the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy released its rather bleak Back From the Brink report. In that report, the chamber highlighted the risks the industry faced due to declining numbers of mining engineers, extractive metallurgists and earth scientists. Indeed, according to CMEWA economist Reg Howard Smith, the number of mining engineers peaked in 1988.
That report led the Minerals Council of Australia to create its Minerals Tertiary Education Council (MTEC), which has taken on the task of rebuilding Australia’s stocks of mining professionals.
Mining engineering courses have fallen away due to a lack of students. In the late 1990s and early 2000s when mining was in the doldrums, there was a big demand for information technology and finance places and few students wanted to become geologists, metallurgists or mine engineers, where they might have to go and live out in the bush, far from the city lights.
Some in the industry say this poor perception of the industry comes from primary and secondary schools and there are numerous programs in place to tackle this.
However, there is also a realisation that the education at a tertiary level needs to be tightened up. On the engineering front this has happened, with MEA starting to get its programs in place and securing funding from the Minerals Council of Australia and the Federal Government.
There are signs, however, that the trend of students avoiding mining and going into other disciplines is starting to end. The WA School of Mines, for example, has reported a record number of enrolments.
The MEA joint venture was formed in July 2006 and the Federal Government has provided up to $1.325 million under its Collaboration and Structural Reform program.
University of NSW School of Mining Engineering professor Bruce Hebblewhite said the three MEA universities were expecting to graduate about 100 students between them in the first year of the program.
“But all three of us are on the way back up and have been for the past two years. I think 180 students started first year of mining engineering last year and we’re expecting something similar this year.”
Besides providing a national curriculum, Hebblewhite said there would also be staff-sharing opportunities and interactive projects between students at different universities. “It’s all about creating a more marketable program for the attraction of students,” he said.
While the MEA’s actions will be centred around its three member universities, it will not be ignoring other universities that have engineering offerings.
Hebblewhite said the program was also about forming a relationship with such universities. Under that relationship, students would be able to study two years of, say, a civil engineering degree and then swap to the MEA program for the final two years of their course.
With MEA in place, the emphasis now shifts to finding ways to build up the numbers of metallurgists and earth scientists, which is a tougher proposition. One of the problems with earth scientists, for example, is that there is no guarantee that a graduate will go into mining. With metallurgists, it is understood that there is a dearth of new graduates leaving Australian universities each year. Indeed, much of the load falls to chemists and chemical engineers.
MTEC executive director Kevin Tuckwell admitted the shortages of earth scientists and metallurgists would be harder to tackle but he had set a goal of getting programs in place to alleviate those shortages by the end of this year.
“The challenges facing the other disciplines are different,” Tuckwell said. “Only about 20%, historically, come out of geology and go to work in the mining industry. On the metallurgy front, only about 30 extractive metallurgists graduate from Australian universities each year.
“The issues with metallurgists and earth scientists is to build a program so the [university] departments that deliver good scientists to the mining industry are rewarded.”
The driver for boosting these stocks is that Australian-trained mining professionals, be they engineers, metallurgists or geologists, are well received around the world. After all, Rio Tinto chief Leigh Clifford is a product of the Australian system.
“The global mining industry relies very heavily on Australian mining professionals,” Tuckwell said. “The industry is very comfortable with the style and calibre of the graduates that come out of the Australian system.”
Providing the tertiary course problems can be ironed out – and with MEA in place it seems they are on their way to being solved – the question remains: does more need to be done at a primary and secondary level to attract students to mining disciplines?
Views are mixed on this with organisations such as CMEWA, University of New South Wales and even the Kalgoorlie-based Mining Hall of Fame, running programs aimed at promoting mining to primary and secondary school students.
Hebblewhite said the NSW Minerals Council started a series of regional dinners for Year 10 and 11 students and their science teachers. “They did nine of these last year around the state, including in Sydney and the program has started to pay dividends,” he said.
“At our summer school we had 37 high school students attend. Once you get the students to see what the industry is about, you usually have them.”
However, Tuckwell, while acknowledging the value of programs targeting primary and secondary students, believes promoting mining as a career path will have better results.
To that end, the Minerals Council is creating a website, www.miningcareers.com.au to provide links to all jobs in the industry, as well as education and training in the industry.
