Bust and Boom, the tale of Australia’s two Mining Industries

In the last 20 years the most common entry level mining job has been a surface truck driving job. However, in the last couple of years, due to automation, this has moved from the surface to underground. With an entry level underground truck job paying around $90k a year for an even time roster and a full time job. Not bad for 23 weeks a year of work (you get 20days annual leave and 10days sick leave as a minimum). If you want to make a career out of it, then the top job often pays well over $300k on an even time roster. Yes, that’s over $300k for working a 23 week year.     

So, what’s the catch? It is of course 12hour days, working away from family in the middle of nowhere and in a hazardous workplace. What’s involved with the jobs are very specific to the industry and there aren’t many, if any transferable skills. To oversimplify the process, you are drilling a bunch of holes, shoving explosives into those holes, blowing it up, clearing away the broken rock to the surface and then making the area safe again using ground support. Then you are doing that over and over and over again. Sounds simple enough yet it’s surprising how many green (no mining knowledge on day one) new starters fail. It’s more than 50% fail in the first 6 months and this effects all employers.

When people go in green, it turns into sink or swim training, which often turns into information overload. This is why there is a constant flow of job ads wanting people for these mining jobs. The employers just go through lots of people trying to get a few to stick and make a career out of it. But the majority fail because when they accepted the job they had no idea of what they where going to have to do or the pressure involved in the job. Teaching someone to drive the truck is the easy part. Teaching them enough about how the mine works, so they can be left alone to drive the truck safely on their own, that’s the hard part. This is the experience employers are referring to.

So, if you can show the employer that you know how their mine works and what’s going to be expected of you working on their mine site, then you have something to offer them. This is how we help people help themselves into the mining industry through education. Underground Training has created an online training package to teach a new starter how the Hardrock underground mine works and the exact jobs they will have to do as a new starter (including what the buddy/babysitter should be showing them).

The idea for employers, is to supply them with a new starter that has all the theoretical knowledge of how the mine works, so the new starter can be onboarded like normal (which becomes revision), spend the two weeks teaching them the job (like they do with the Nipper or Truck jobs). Then a short time after that the employer should get a productive member of crew. As long as the employers make sure that the new starter has studied (people that have learned the information really standout) in the interview. Then they will get a good result, someone that will be up to speed in 3-4 weeks instead of the 2-3 months it normally takes.