The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
These are high times for the mining business. It has shrugged off the effects of the 2008 recession on the strength of robust commodity prices. Canada is well-positioned to supply the resource-hungry economies of China and India, our markets are the preferred destination for companies seeking financing, and the industry has $137-billion worth of investment earmarked for the next five years.
What could go wrong? Simply put, running out of people to run the nation’s $36-billion-a-year mining machine.
“There is a huge shift in demographics in the country, in the mining industry, and we are certainly experiencing it in our company,” said Marcia Smith, senior vice-president of sustainability and external affairs at Teck Resources Ltd.
The Vancouver-based coal and copper producer, which employs more than 8,000 people across the country, plans to hire 4,600 people over the next few years. “We are madly recruiting. We have lots and lots of jobs in British Columbia that are we are trying to fill, and that is a challenge.”
The mining industry predicts it will need about 100,000 new workers over the next decade, a demand that has government, education institutions and companies scrambling.
This is not just about the future. In fact, the industry is in the midst of “a pretty acute labour shortage,” said Pierre Gratton, president and chief executive officer of the Mining Association of Canada. “It is across the board, everything from heavy equipment to engineers to geologists to accountants.”
The average age of workers in the mining business is older than that of most other industries, particularly in critical roles such as geology. Most companies have a work force with plenty of people in their fifties and a large group younger than 30, with fewer of the Generation X cohort in between. It’s a stunted harvest of tough times 20 years ago.
“In the 1990s because we weren’t doing very well, we weren’t hiring a lot of people,” Mr. Gratton said. “We missed that generation.”
Mining companies are trying to ensure that the hard-earned knowledge of baby boomer-aged employees doesn’t retire along with them. “We are working on that right now, how we transfer knowledge from older workers to younger workers,” said Teck Resources’ Ms. Smith. “Phased retirements, all those kinds of things.”
For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/mining-sector-expects-hiring-boom/article2376968/