Attraction of Young People to the Australian Mining
Workforce - A Perspective from New Professionals
Alison Keogh, Independent Consultant Geologist
Rob Johansen, MD Global Asset Resource Exchange
Pat Hanna, SRK Principal Consultant Geologist
Presented by Alison Keogh
At AusIMM Congress 2004, Townsville, Australia
The aims of this talk are two-fold:

First, to briefly discuss how at branch level, you can encourage more
involvement in AusIMM from new professionals

And second, the main thrust of this talk; how to attract young or new
professionals and skilled workforce to Australian mining - a marketing
proposal for AusIMM delegates to consider
The issues of attraction & retention of people in our industry are complex and wideranging. Today, I can only do justice to one aspect of attracting people to our
industry. I do acknowledge the need to address a wide range of critical issues
We feel that branch committees, in many cases, should play an active part in
recruiting New Professionals.
Why? Within the AusIMM, we have only a handful of active committees and new
professionals at branch level. New professionals are “missing in action” in the
AusIMM – we tend to have too little involvement from them at technical talks or on
committees. And clearly in our Industry, we need to address and understand the
skills shortage. We can help to retain skilled people in the industry by providing:

Networking, career-management and feedback opportunities

Services relevant to young to mid-career professionals

A voice for young people

A vehicle for change
and it is important to encourage pride and involvement in the industry at all levels
How can we do this? AusIMM branches can encourage more involvement from New
Professionals by recruiting active young to mid-career professionals to NP committee

Preferably, through your own individual contacts via committee members
(face-to-face, ph, e-mail)

Or alternatively, if you don’t have contacts, with Central Services’ assistance.
Bronwyn Meadows-Smith’s role includes assisting us with help & advice on
New Professional and Student issues
We suggest, and this is from our experience of success in a larger, city-based
branch:

That NP representatives or committee members are automatically on the
local branch committee – and encouraged to attend meetings and be involved
in branch decisions

That NP representative or committee focus on active networking events to get
more young to mid career professionals involved (whether or not members) –
events such as lunches, BBQs, technical talks, golf days – whatever is
relevant to the local area / branch setup,

That the NP committee is above all fun, involved, informal

That branch members actively support their initiatives by attending events
and actively encouraging & logistically or financially supporting where
possible, NP initiatives
We at branch level need to extend our hand out to young to mid-career
professionals. It can be quite intimidating to enter a room of senior industry
professionals.
This year, our committee has rolled out a survey of new professionals in Queensland
to get feedback about their perspectives on the industry and what they want from
AusIMM. We suggest that you consider distributing a similar survey regionally for
feedback from NPs, to provide a perspective that AusIMM is interested in their
issues, & increase interest & involvement. We’re happy to provide our survey if you
wish to use it as a starting point, and invite improvement ideas.
The second, and main issue I want to discuss in this talk is marketing of our industry.
What do we know now?

Australian Mining has a serious community perception problem

Most of the time, the Australian mining industry gets media exposure for all
the wrong reasons – a fatatlity, an environmental incident

There is very little co-ordinated, pro-active, effective media “good news”
stories to combat this

Many secondary and tertiary students and young people unaware of
Australian mining career options
Everyone is aware of this, and I think everyone here would agree with these points
The recent attraction & retention workshop in Perth concluded that as high priority we
need initiatives to address Australian mining’s image – including advertising,
marketing, career promotion and disseminating information.
I would suggest the primary cause of lack of interest in the Australian mining industry
is community perception & lack of knowledge of our industry.
So, what do we know we need? We need to primarily attract those young people,
and also if possible their parents, who have influence in their career decisions by
changing the perception of Australian mining to an attractive workplace with excellent
career options.
How do we do it? We propose that we pro-actively change the community
perception of Australian mining by marketing targetted specifically to Generation Y.
Generation Y are people currently aged under 25, and for reference, Generation X
are from 25 to 39 years old.
Although there are widely varying views, overall marketing and social studies tell us
that Generation Y are:
•
More self-interested, individualistic
(they are likely to view “loyalty” to a company as a thing of the past)
•
Strongly technology and Internet-driven (shorter attention span)
•
Higher disposable income than any generation in history
•
Want choices and career flexibility
•
Want decision-making opportunities
•
Strongly influenced by media (followers of trends)
•
Sceptical of authority (eg; war in Iraq)
Therefore they are likely to respond to short duration marketing techniques, identify
with individuals/individual style, and doing your own thing.
Here are two examples of marketing advertisements to a target, Generation Y
audience
•
•
ADF Air Officer video
ADF Rifleman video
The style of the marketing and target to Generation Y is the key. The content can be
adjusted to suit our industry, although in these two ads, you could draw some
parallels of the Air Force Officer with a new professional and the rifleman with a
young semi-skilled employee or operator in our industry.
The phrase “What happens next, it’s your call” is a good analogy. We are at a critical
point in our industry, and it is up to us to decide our industry’s future. We need to

Start providing solutions

Act now

And act effectively
to address both attraction & retention issues in our industry
I am focusing only on one aspect of attraction: the image of the industry and
marketing to a key target audience – Generation Y. This should not detract from the
just as critical issues of retention, some of which we must also address with practical
solutions now. For example, in our survey of young to mid-career professionals in
Queensland, some of the key issues to address to retain people are

Long work hours

Lack of family and lifestyle balance

& Poor management of people by employers, particularly in terms of flexible
career options
Attraction issues centred around reducing mineral courses and places in the tertiary
sector are also just as critical.
So what are we doing now? There are a number of positive initiatives currently being
run or put in place to improve perception in primary and secondary schools, involving
programs run by organisations such as the:
•
Minerals Council of Australia
•
Minerals Tertiary Education Council (for example, National
Education Program, primarily targeting primary school students’
perception fo the industry)
•
The “Industry Experience for Undergraduates” program
•
AusIMM – for example the Australian Student Mineral Venture in
late secondary schools, and next week’s involvement in Career Expo
in Melbourne (and I commend the united approach with other key
organisations in this)
•
And in Queensland, the Queensland Resources Council has statespecific initiatives, as well as similar programs in other states
And importantly, we have a collaborative effort involving many of these organisations
in the Attraction & Retention workshops, one of which has already been held in Perth
in June, and one of which is due to be held in Brisbane in October.
So what is the result of our past initiatives? Some of the past advertising campaigns
were:
•
•
In the late 80’s, a print media cartoon-style campaign with slogans such as
“Mine for You and Me”, “Mining Matters” and “Everything that isn’t grown is
mined”.
In the mid 90’s a TV ad featuring a family progressively stripped of everything
not produced by mining
These were a failure. We need to research why, and ask this question externally to
our industry, from young people of that generation.
•
•
•
•
There is evidence of continuing overall decline in course entries, & closing
mining schools
Continuing net loss of skilled and professional people
There is poor community perception of our industry
and arguably, we could be getting better support from state and federal
governments in terms of the framework to operate. As a democratic society,
government priorities are driven by community priorities and perceptions, and
therefore unfortunately for us, votes.
What aren’t we doing now?

We’re not having an immediate effect on recruitment into tertiary courses

Pro-active media “good news” Australian mining stories and career profiles
are limited & ineffective

We don’t appear to community as a united front
What can we learn from the Australian Defence Force?
They have provided an excellent example of how to market effectively to Generation
Y. The videos we saw show
•
An individual narrating their experience
•
In a strongly technological setting
•
With a focus on diversity of careers within the military
•
And the action switches quickly from one scene to the next.
The difference from previous marketing campaigns is enormous – the Australian
Defence Force is actively changing the community image of defence force jobs.
They have a sustained goal. The 2000 Defence White Paper identified problems. A
symptom of these problems was their shrinking workforce and the cause was poor
recruitment and poor retention. They concluded that if they didn’t address this with a
marketing campaign they wouldn’t achieve their goal of proposed increase in size of
ADF’s permanent force from 51 500 to 54 000 members by 2010.
They put in multi-million dollar funding to address this, with a united marketing front
across the air force, navy and army, and a marketing campaign that was pro-active,
big-scale and effective. They have proven their success. They have achieved a
quantum turn-around in attraction & retention of young people, and I would argue the
perception of Australian Defence Force (ADF) career options and perception of the
Australian Defence Force environment.
They also put in place follow-up and monitoring measures. They set up a single, 131
number for direct, person-to-person ADF careers/recruiting advice and conduct
surveys of people who have applied to ADF for recruitment.
What has ADF achieved? The ADF “… generated an increase of almost 50 per cent
in full-time recruitment enlistments in the past three years”, according to a Media
Release in 2002 from the Minister Assisting, the Minister for Defence. Graphs show
the numbers over the Total Defence Force between 1999-2000 FY and 2002-03 FY
Increased by 15% (14,700 people). Within the Permanent Force this was an
increase of 1284 people (3%), the Reserve Force an increase of 1742 (8%) and
Cadets & Officers/Instructors an increase of 11690 (42%). So the increase has
occurred mostly in the target market of the younger, secondary school age bracket.
Enquiries doubled from 70,000 to 150,000 following the start of the campaign.
Let’s compare the ADF and Australian Mining for a minute. In the 2002-2003
financial year the ADF lost 1500 people, whilst Australian Mining lost about 4500.
Overall, the number of people in the ADF permanent and reserve forces is about the
same as the total number of people employed in the mining industry. So we see that
in ADF, despite lower salaries across the board, arguably a higher fatality risk (and
we need to check numbers here), similar remote locations and extended periods
away from home, the ADF has greater success in recruiting and retaining people.
How did the ADF go about this? In their Strategic Review of Personnel, ADF took a
two-pronged approach, with a Community Consultation Team looking “outside” and a
Defence Consultation Team looking “internally”. We in the Australian mining industry
tend to look internally, and need to focus on community outside perceptions to
market successfully.
What is the pool of people? The workforce we are primarily marketing to is approx
five million people: that is the number of 18-35 year olds in work or actively seeking
work. From this, an increase of people who would consider Australian mining as a
career by 1% would be an increase of 50,000 people. Of those, if only 1% actually
commit, that would give us an extra 500 people per year. The ADF has achieved far
greater than this number with their large-scale campaign, so this is not unrealistic
What are the consequences of continuing as we are? We already have a skills
shortage, and although I do not have the numbers for skills shortage projections at
hand, qualitatively, I ask the question - are we going to have enough mining
engineers in Australia in 10 years time to act as mine managers? In 5 year’s time?
The answer is probably no. If not, then recruitment will get more difficult and costs
will go up even more as we bring people in from overseas and train them in the
Australian legislative and industry environment.
So what are the quantitative costs? Estimates of direct cost vary widely, but one
mid-range estimate from Bond Recruiting quotes $30,000 cost per employee who
leaves (including the cost of recruiting, advertising, moving an employee and
training). For 4500 odd people this equates to a net loss to the Australian mining
industry of $135 million in the 2002-2003 year alone.
What are the qualitative costs? Indirect costs include:

Lost business opportunities, revenue, business improvements and
knowledge, which I suggest have the potential to be far greater.

Fewer Australian professionals, and more people not trained in discipline
If you put less well trained people in positions in our mining industry, you could
conceive of situations where

A person miscalculates a slope stability factor that leads to a wall failure not
being predicted

A geologist misinterprets a geological feature, and on this basis a company
makes a wrong NPV estimate which stops a project from getting off the
ground.
The key point of a larger marketing campaign would be to encourage a larger base of
people, which should lead to more people entering the industry and a choice of
smarter recruits in the industry
So our proposal for your consideration is pro-active marketing, targeted at
Generation Y. This would involve an advertising campaign capable of changing
community perception of Australian mining as an attractive place to work, carefully
researched by a good advertising agency, and tailored to our specific target audience
and industry needs. The cost of this is uncertain until we do more research, and
funding would be a challenge, no doubt. But let’s say roughly $5 million per year, for
3 years. This would equate to a cost of approximately $60 to $70 per mining industry
employee. It could be more than this.
The alternative is to continue to cost possibly $30,000 or more per lost employee,
which equates to ongoing direct cost of $2000 for every employee in Australian
mining, and greater intangible losses of knowledge, with little prospect of real
improvement over time.
If you have long-term vision, I believe it is only a small and short-term cost that can
be well justified.
In addition, we propose a pro-active marketing role. A person who can coordinate
and submit regular career profiles (eg; regular profiles into CareerOne), and regular
technology and innovation stories (eg; Catalyst, etc), across media forms. This
person would need to be:
•
Passionate and informed about our industry
•
Know the right contacts to get stories published and make a difference
through key people in the media
•
Coordinate an effective campaign
The right person would be well worth paying for (let’s say $200K per annum).
We would need to present a united front in this campaign, and it would need to be
funded across industry & from government, for at least three years.
We also propose that the industry considers setting up an accessible, single 1800
MINING number or similar for minerals careers information, preferably with a direct
person to contact at the other end.
Whilst this is put in place, we must also in parallel focus on retention issues internally
within our industry & the critical issues surrounding tertiary courses.
This is the starting point. What happens next is up to you. We represent a crosssection of leaders in our industry. It is a big challenge, but I don’t believe it is
insurmountable, and I do believe we of all people need to be positive about our
industry, and its prospects.
The AusIMM has been the catalyst before, and has brought industry organisations
together by coordinating the first attraction & retention workshop. We now need your
input, and if you think this is a direction we should take, people who are willing to
volunteer a little time and some ideas.
There is a wealth of experience in this room, and from those newer to the industry, a
lot of energy and ideas. Let’s look at putting into action some real solutions to
address our industry’s attraction & retention Issues.