To cap it off we read on the wires that our friends at the Australian Bureau of Statistics released some great numbers that mineral exploration increased by a whopping 36% or $133 million over the March quarter.

Now according to the chronicles of What makes a good supplier – Crosscut Clyde, 1974 – today the way to work out where the market is heading is to monitor the first basics of need. In the case of the mining game you don’t have to be Einstein to work it out.

However I will spell it out anyway – where dollars are being spent on exploration it is a sound bet there is a big need just around the corner.

It’s when the exploration ebbs or shuts down entirely that one needs to worry. It wasn’t that long ago there were gangs of geologists roaming the streets of mining towns in search of the next wave. Like tribes of lost surfers, so to speak.

Well it appears the tsunami of the mining industry has hit the beach. But I digress, so let’s get to the looming issue at hand.

As I mentioned last week, I strolled the stands at AIMEX and not one person told me they were worried about where the next dollar was coming from. No, what they were really worried about was how they were going to service the demand. Not with just products, but people. And this really is concerning.

It was overwhelmingly obvious to me the exhibits were ‘manned’ (apologies to the female gender, but I don’t know a better word) by persons of an average age that is much older than it was way back in the 1990s.

Where are all the young and energetic souls who don’t get tired legs or sore backs when they do their long hours on the stand? Nowhere to be seen. And that means the industry is ageing and not replacing itself with the younger breed of company technical, service and application representatives. Why is that so?

I hazard a guess that it’s because the most likely resource for these groups are either fresh out of university and can earn mega-bucks at the coal face, or hard rock face, or drillrig, and so on.

Or alternatively the other resource base being the trades and it’s not uncommon to see this group earning the same, if not more, than the graduates.

So what the supplier base has now is a stable of well-oiled and learned but slightly tired diehards who simply cannot keep up the pace that is expected.

Sure they have the knowledge but there isn’t anyone to teach - and for once old Crosscut Clyde hasn’t an answer for this predicament.

How can you expect the supplier base to go out and recruit new potential staff and train and groom them, when there is simply no way they can match the pay cheques offered by the resource sector?

And where will the future technical reps, service and application engineers and company reps emerge from once the bubble bursts?

From the coal face? But they won’t get the same money they were used to – but maybe they won’t need to because they will have already set up their respective lives and lifestyles. And if they haven’t, then they should give this serious consideration.

I would like to be proved wrong but I don’t believe the younger tradespeople nor the new university graduates get the opportunity or exposure to read this column, but I daresay many of the other groups I have mentioned do cast their eye over it.

So to you I suggest that you give some consideration to a lifestyle change, career change or even take the opportunity to look on the other side of the desk and consider the supplier sector. You may not get the same money but then again you may get a pleasant surprise.

Now I don’t wish for anyone to take me the wrong way and suggest the older guys and gals out there in supplier land are has-beens.

That’s simply not the case, because as we all know knowledge and experience are the basics for the University of Life. But fresh blood is a necessity in any industry, and we need to think about where our fresh blood is going to come from.