A hand-up rather than a hand-out has long been the motto of Fortescue Metals Group founder and chairman Andrew Forrest so it is little surprise that Aboriginal involvement has been a key plank of the company from the beginning.

FMG community development manager Blair McGlew has been involved with FMG's Vocational Training and Employment Centre pretty much from its inception.

Interestingly, FMG is not the first company to adopt the VTEC Aboriginal employment model. Forrest had it at Anaconda when he founded that company. After he left that company it was brought to FMG.

When McGlew started with FMG it was still an exploration company and his role was much more around getting government and Native Title approvals.

"The first thing Andrew asked me about was how do we drive Aboriginal employment in the business?" he said.

"It was always front and centre for him. If the leader values it you know it's going to be driven."

The VTEC program is a commitment to its participants that if they go into the training and complete the training there will be a job for them at the end of it.

FMG ran its first VTEC course in 2007.

McGlew said VTEC development manager Damien Ardagh, on taking the first VTEC course, told him that there had never been a real training program for Aboriginal people in the Pilbara.

He said probably two or three of the graduates from that first VTEC still worked for FMG.

To be eligible for VTEC potential participants need to have been unemployed for some time and on some kind of unemployment benefit.

The 13-week program is not so much about developing skills but rather making sure the participants have the right behaviours to work on an FMG site.

A typical VTEC day starts at 6am with attendees put through a "boot camp" exercise program. After a shower attendees then settle in for the days learnings.

"We test people and see how they relate to each other," McGlew said.

"Do they support each other? If you've got the right behaviours, the skills will come."

To get into the program potential candidates have to attend an information session and apply.

FMG has a health coordinator who will help those attendees whose health conditions may preclude them from working for the miner to get their conditions under control.

FMG may have about 100 people apply for the program and only take nine or 10.

While VTEC these days does not focus on any specific areas, the very first program focused on skills related to railway development.

When FMG was developing its railways it discovered the skills needed to do that were lacking so it had to develop them itself.

Ironically, when the other iron ore majors built their railway lines in the 1960s they brought in Thursday Islanders to do a lot of the track laying work.

This time FMG was looking much closer to home.

FMG Aboriginal development superintendent Ayla Stewart completed the VTEC program in 2014.

The single mother of three sons wanted to do more for her kids.

Stewart wanted to buy her own home and send her children to better schools.
"For someone who doesn't have experience it's hard to get a foot in the door," she said.

"VTEC was my start. I saw it as an opportunity in the simplest form - providing the training to be work ready with a guaranteed job at the end of it."

For Stewart that job was as a mining production operator, driving dump trucks at FMG's Cloudbreak mine.

After about a year in the job she was approached by the mine's Aboriginal development team, who knew she had some administration experience.

That led to a job as a personal assistance for FMG general manager Maryanne Kelly.

Stewart's family has strong ties to the Pilbara. Her grandfather is from the Myamal people and her grandmother from the Martu people.

"Because I have a passion for our people and wanted to do more I took on additional project work," she said.

That led to things such as cultural events on site and working with the Aboriginal workforce on site.

Stewart took on her superintendent role in July 2017.    

The mining company has not focused its Aboriginal employment push entirely on the Pilbara either.

FMG CEO Elizabeth Gaines said the company chartered flights to Kununurra, Fitzroy Crossing and Broome to bring in the 43 employees it has in the Kimberley.

Of those 43 employees, 40 of them are Aboriginal.

While getting Aboriginal people into employment has been a key for FMG, so too has getting Aboriginal businesses up and going.

FMG community development manager Heath Nelson joined the company seven years ago with the job of increasing the number of Aboriginal companies in its supply chain.

It was not an easy task.

"I found some of our [FMG's] key performance indicators did not align with my KPIs," he said.

"I was initially finding it difficult for Aboriginal businesses to get onto tender lists.

"Nobody knew who they were. Probably for the first six months I was just going through a process of discovering that for myself and then introducing them into our tenders."

While the Aboriginal businesses were on the tender lists, they were still finding it hard to compete.

Nelson set about changing that.

He discovered that while FMG had an Aboriginal employment target, it did not have one for Aboriginal business.

"I put a two-page memo to Nev [then FMG CEO Nev Power] and Andrew and with a couple of tweaks they approved it," Nelson said.

That meant he had the backing of the CEO and the board and getting Aboriginal business involvement became part of the company's KPIs.

The initial target was to get $1 billion in Aboriginal contracts.

That target was reached in 18 months and involved 52 Aboriginal businesses.

"That was when we were building Solomon and the industry was growing," Nelson said.

It took another 4.5 years to get to the next $1 billion.

Remember, over those 4.5 years the iron ore industry went into a major contraction and there was a lot of cost cutting.

The number of Aboriginal businesses involved grew from 52 to 110.

"One thing we did was to break larger contracts into sizes that suited Aboriginal businesses," Nelson said.

"The other was to encourage joint ventures."

FMG helped Aboriginal businesses wanting to get into mining to partner with established mining businesses that were looking for Aboriginal involvement.

"The other game changer was we put Aboriginal engagement as part of the tender process," Nelson said.

"We really valued businesses that had Aboriginal ownership or high levels of Aboriginal employment.

"We were finding a lot of other JVs were forming.

"One of the conditions in our contracts is that the capability partner had to build the capability of the non-capability partner."

FMG staffers would go to the JV partners' board meetings to see how the capability building was going. Was the capability partner passing on the information? Was the non-capability partner doing what it could to improve?

Nelson said a key point of all of this was not to get an Aboriginal business one contract but to help that business grow so it could compete on other tenders from other miners or move into other industries.

Aboriginal business owner Tammy O'Connor is a case in point.

O'Connor had been looking to get into the mining business. However, because she came from a civils background she was trying to set up a business in that area.

"Heath mentioned there was this environmental services business out there and it wanted Indigenous involvement," she said.

"They got me to work on site at Solomon."

That business was CD Dodd.

Out of that has grown Kingkira Dodd, a business focused on scrap metal recycling.

Kingkira is O'Connor's business vehicle, named for her children Kingston and Kira.

It has 50% of Kingkira Integrated Security too.

Besides FMG, her businesses have contracts with Rio Tinto and is about to start a government contract.