As predictions accumulate that our industry’s skills crunch will only worsen, mentoring continues its evolution from symposium buzzword to indispensable business strategy.

Bringing more women, foreign and indigenous workers into the mix has been roundly embraced as a must for meeting personnel shortfalls, but promoting upward mobility and developing future leaders is part of the equation too.

Without the proper support programs in place, resource companies are likely to lose new recruits out the back door almost as quickly as they can get them in.

So establishing a mentoring scheme and ticking the box fine – but if miners are serious about confronting shortages of experience and skill, they’re going to have to make efforts to maximise return on the program.

To find out how best to set up a mentoring program and accelerate skills development, MiningNewsPremium.net spoke with Jim Knowles, managing director of the Jim Knowles Group risk management and training organisation.

Knowles considers his 40 years of “hard knocks” in the mining industry as a resource that can be tapped by new supervisors.

He says leadership skills don’t need a lifetime to develop if new approaches to training are embraced across the industry.

“We teach them how to do the technical side of the work, but it’s the softer things behind them we don’t always teach them,” he explained.

“We give somebody a qualification and all of a sudden we expect they now have the ability to step up in front of 40 people and make a presentation.

“We also make the expectation that now that they have the supervisor’s role, they can solve every marital problem when people come to work and that they can pick up every geological anomaly in the mine.

“We don’t teach those softer skills, and mentoring helps with that.”

Knowles’s program is an intimate, strictly face-to-face coaching exercise. He lives on site for a few shifts, meets with the employees one-on-one, follows them around and offers suggestions on their decision-making processes.

“If I can get to a guy on day one and calm him down, walk with him, go through the steps of the role, how he should be leading and talking to his people, then we can set the ground rules very early,” he said.

“Then you can see that guy grow and grow. I come back in six months’ time and he’s a smarter operator.

“After a period of several months, they know they can talk to you totally in confidence and they’re asking questions about the best way to do it and it becomes a very, very powerful tool.”

Knowles says when a company is establishing a mentoring program, it has to be formalised yet free-floating within the company without any direct supervision and reporting back to superiors.

The idea is to establish confidence such that management trusts the mentor to lead the workforce in the right direction and mentees feel unthreatened and open to participation.

Visible endorsement and participation by senior staff, meanwhile, is essential to lend credibility to the program.

This represents another reminder that mentoring is all about the intangibles.

When setting up a program, employees will respond best if they have a number of options including external and internal mentoring, face-to-face methods or online portals.

The important thing to remember is that mentoring is not a one-size-fits-all solution – it’s an all-hands-on-deck shift in training philosophy needed to usher in the next wave of mining talent.