Published in the January 2006 Australia’s Mining Monthly

This Canadian-born woman has had a career of many firsts and has expressed her beliefs about women in the mining industry in many previous interviews. When Markovic won a Queensland Resources Council Resources Award for Women (another first), she spoke about women being an untapped resource when it came to addressing skills shortages in the industry and that it was a good time for young women to look to the minerals industry for a future.

There is an infectious enthusiasm in Markovic’s tone when she describes the life she lives as manager of the Poitrel Mine, a topic she would far rather talk about. “Just eight months ago we were still sitting in an office in Brisbane; by April we were turning soil on site,” she says. “Then came our September 2006 milestones of having most of the infrastructure in place, and taking out our first tonne of coal. Just two months later we were washing product. Having those successes in a short space of time helped cement in the minds of the whole team the reason we’re here.”

Markovic describes her job as “exhilarating” and believes there is a romantic side to watching the achievement of steady incremental progress every day. “It’s quite something going away for a weekend and returning to site on a Monday with the kitchen finished, or the sleeping quarters up.”

These successes are all the more important because her team is small; BMA’s approach is to ensure that each person is allowed an input and that their opinions count. Markovic says that their success belongs to everyone involved.

One reason for their achievements is that Markovic and her team have made sure that the contractors, Leighton, and their sub-contractors are welcomed on-site and treated respectfully. She explains that if you give sub-contractors more choice about where they can work, there’s more chance they will choose your site. “We’ve also had to ensure that we do our planning so as to get onto sub-contractor rosters. We too have to get in line for electricians.”

Preparatory work before moving on-site had included working with Leighton to develop a shared purpose, Markovic explains. The team worked together to visualise the outcomes they wanted before they even started.

BHPB has given Markovic fantastic opportunities. One of her career firsts was to secure a job at Ekati, Canada’s very first diamond mine and a joint-venture operation between BHPB and Dia Met Minerals. (One of her professors at the University of British Columbia was on the Dia Met’s board.) This diamond adventure in 1994 gave her significant experience in diverse skills very early on in her career as a mining engineer. She describes it as a fabulous period where “we were doing things from the ground up”, a world that captivated her for four years. BHP then took her to Northern Alberta before she returned to the Ekati diamond mine to do some permitting work and her MBA.

“After thirty-three months of working on that degree I began to look for a way in which I could use my new skills along with my engineering background,” she says. She found a niche through BHP’s Operating Excellence (now renamed Business Excellence) initiative, coordinating an initiative to ensure BMA becomes an employer of choice. This brought her to Australia and BMA’s Gregory Crinum mine, which was her first experience of coal, longwall mining and draglines.

Making the move from Canada to the middle of Queensland, where there is no shopping on Sundays but the pubs are open and everyone has a nickname, has been a bit of a culture shock. Markovic admits she still gets thrown by the Aussie vernacular.

Her entry into coalmining expanded her experience from a commodity point of view.

She is mindful of the opportunity for diversity of place, product and skills offered by working for such a vast global company, something that puts the company in a position to better retain skills and offer employees the opportunity to travel to new places. Retaining and gaining skills in the group is something Markovic knows about; her MBA thesis was on retaining competent professionals in the industry.

This was in 2003. Tina and her team began the project by surveying current and previous BMA engineers and eventually implemented a multi-faceted program. “We had to achieve an improved understanding of people and their salary expectations; work was done around salary packaging. We found that some work had to be done on BMA’s brand awareness, too. Centralised recruitment has helped, as has the tremendous opportunity for growth and development offered to engineers.”

A year down the track, Markovic says that she has enjoyed the opportunity to work with the marketing team and interact with customers. It is BMA policy to ensure that mine managers collaborate with marketing in this way, once again broadening opportunity and perspective for staff.