In the skills strategy report, released by MISC in December 2007, workforce planning and workforce development were highlighted as key to the industry moving forward with skills.

Hunter said workforce planning was related to developing ways to encourage people to join the mining industry, as financial benefits were not necessarily enough to attract employees.

“If you’re young and wanting to work in an industry it’s always been assumed that mining will pay the best that’s not necessarily true anymore.”

While there have been many attraction and retention strategies introduced by various mining companies, Hunter said it needed to be addressed by the industry as a whole.

“What we see is one-off approaches by independent companies, so we’re seeing company approaches on the basis of the difficulties they’re faced with … what we’re looking at is how do we actually apply that in a much broader sense.”

One of the major elements of workforce planning that Hunter said had been overlooked was the creation of pathways into the industry, to make it easier for people to enter.

“We actually have to work on the actual image of the industry itself, and we have to work on the whole question of career pathways so that people understand what it is they’re entering into and what the pathway for their future is.”

One way to create pathways into the industry is by offering training that is integrated with the workforce. The Mining Industry Skills Centre's Work Readiness Program, which launched this month, is one example of this.

"The actual work readiness program is a pathway program for people who've never worked in heavy industry before and it's designed clearly to give them time to immerse themselves in an understanding of what a heavy industry or a resource industry site is going to be like and the difficulties they will meet there," Hunter said.

"Basically they do approximately two weeks in the classroom and then three weeks practical work on site and at the completion of that five week period they will be offered employment if they've been successful, so the program is linked to employment, and I think that's pretty crucial.

"Once they're employed, their training continues to be logged, so they're not just left to their own resources. The link between the company and the RTO (registered training organisation) and ourself continues to chart the progress of the work-ready participant through to the point where they gain their Certificate 2."

The course specific to underground coal mining will run for longer than the above-ground course, and will be trialled in the next two months.

"It is recognised that the complexity of underground mining is significantly different and significantly more challenging … it will be a longer period of development and it will work in with existing understandings about the requirements for working in underground mines."

The second key factor in dealing with the skills shortage, workplace development, involves making the mining industry more attractive as a long-term career prospect.

“If in actual fact people are living and working in extreme remote areas, you have to actually think about how you’re going to hold those people as part of your workforce for a significant period of time.

“I think all too readily we accept it’s too difficult so we just churn staff through … we need to be looking at the types of strategies that make that type of work environment more amenable to people.”

Some strategies that Hunter suggested were a "mummy" shift a rostering structure for parents that fits in with school drop-off and pick-up times and different fly-in, fly-out rosters.

"What we're trying to do within the skills strategy is to collate the widest possible range of strategies and make those available to the industry as a whole, and to update that as new strategies become available," he said.