Published in the January 2006 Australia’s Mining Monthly
Even Engineers Australia, the professional body representing more than 80,000 engineers, is calling for cadetships to be brought back.
On the face of it, bringing back the old engineering cadetship would be a good way to help address the skills shortage mining companies find themselves faced with. For one thing, these cadets could fill gaps in mining operations such as truck driving while they are learning their craft. It would also breed a mine savvy engineer who has several years knowledge of a particular mine operation.
The benefits for the engineering cadet in question come in terms of the experience gained through working the art while learning it and through the ability to earn an income while studying.
Admittedly, the life of an engineering cadet on a mine would be a tough one. A hard day in the mining field would often be followed by a hard night on the books or at classes but the benefits are there for both the cadet and the company.
Conventional wisdom, however, appears to have moved away from the old mining cadetships, with graduate programs more the order of the day. BHP Billiton, for example, prefers to take its engineers as graduates and train them up. However, the mining giant does have the advantage of being able to offer any graduates the opportunity to work in various regions and on different projects.
AMC Consultants managing director Peter McCarthy owes his engineering career to a cadetship. He lived in Broken Hill and was able to do his engineering degree through the university there and work at the mine during the day.
“The benefit to the mining company is that they have a productive employee straightaway,” McCarthy said.
GeoConsult principal consultant Warwick Smyth is another who started his working career through a cadetship. In his case it was in geology. He believes it will help attract more school leavers to the industry.
“It encourages people to go into the industry rather than sitting uni for three to four years and not earning anything. It also means you can learn the job.”
Engineers Australia national president Rolfe Hartley is also backing the call to bring back engineering cadets. Indeed, he too started out as a cadet.
He said cadetships were once the main way for people to get started in engineering, although that was back when the public sector accounted for 80% of the engineers and the private sector for 20%. These days, those numbers have pretty much reversed after government agencies set about shedding those skills through the 1990s and instead opted to bring them in from private sources.
“In the mining sector, certainly there were large companies that offered cadetships to university students. I remember BHP used to offer one. You’d do the first year of your course over two years while working at one of its mines and then do the next three years full-time at university and work for the company on the holidays.
“We would see cadetships as a valuable tool for the mining industry. While it’s hard to come with a fix in the short term, the longer term fix is for miners to look more to growing their own resources.”
A BHPB spokeswoman said the company was focused on its graduate program rather than any return to the old mining cadetship days. “What we do have is a lot of greenfields recruiting,” she said. “We’re looking at countries such as India, Russia and the like.”
McCarthy also believes that another way to address the skills shortage is to move non-mine specific tasks such as accounting, mine planning and mine scheduling – to an extent – to regional centres.
That would make attracting people to those jobs easier because it would remove the problem of people not wanting to work away from the major regional centres. “I think a lot of that stuff can be done remotely via a broadband connection,” he said.
“Also, there are a lot of tasks that are currently being done by mine engineers and geologists that could be done by non-mine engineers and people who aren’t geologists. A lot of the drudgery of ore body modelling could be done by a smart high school graduates who are good at computer games.”
However, companies such as AMC Consultants, Geoconsult, Snowden and Coffey are finding it easier than their clients to find staff.
As McCarthy explained, mining consultancies tended to give their employees more control over their lives.
“We’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with our ability to get good people,” he said. “A number of those people are those who didn’t want to live their lives on fly-in, fly-out or in a company’s head office under great pressure. Consultancy gives people some control over their lives.”
