Australian Mining has announced that a new online forum has been developed to discuss issues of the skills shortage in the mining sector in Australia.

Mining for Skills, developed by Manpower, is an online forum hoping to engage people and companies at all corners of the resource industry, from government and resource companies to recruitment professionals and job seekers.

Reporters from Nunatsiaq Online hear from Hans Henrichsen, manager of the Greenland School of Minerals and Petroleum in Sisimiut.

"We are taking the best of the best in Greenland. Our goal is to prove that Greenland miners are as good as any around the world,” Henrichsen said March 31 to a group of visitors from Nunavut. Agnico-Eagles Mines Ltd. flew the group to Greenland following a two-day tour of the company’s gold mine in Kittilä, Finland, where the Nunavut visitors met numerous highly educated Finns who have landed good jobs in mining.

SRK Consulting partner and principal mining geotechnical engineer William Joughin tells Mining Weekly that deep-level mining in South Africa is suffering from a severe shortage of qualified rock engineers.

The ever-increasing demand for commodities is resulting in the growth of mining operations, Joughin notes.
“This significant growth is creating the demand for qualified rock engineers, which has yet to be met,” he says.
He adds that, locally, the shortage is exacerbated by rock engineers leaving South Africa to pursue other attractive opportunities in Australia and Canada.

Cole Latimer of Australian Mining reports that Minara Resources, Australia's second-largest nickel producer, is looking to increase the number of women on its mines to address the skills shortage.

Minara says about 30% of its current workforce are women.

The miner’s human resources manager Peter Bourne told the ABC that a number of campaigns are kicking off to encourage more women into mining.

“There's a lot of good work going on, I know the chamber of minerals and energy in Perth have promoted it through their women in mining celebrations recently," Bourne said.

ASTM International is sponsoring a Coal Chemistry Technician Training course in November of this year in response to the increased demand for testing of fossil fuels and plant emissions.
A B.S. Chemist degree or a Chemical Technician degree or equivalent with 3-5 years experience is recommended to take this course.

This new course focuses on 40 ASTM coal characterization standards that are used every day around the world. Laboratory technicians and chemists, professionals new to testing, and anyone working in fossil fuel testing laboratories will benefit from this course.

Maish R. Nichani, editor of the elearningpost blog, reviews Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown's book A New Culture of Learning, which explores the concept that "the world is changing faster than ever and our skill sets have a shorter and shorter life." One beautiful aspect that the authors highlight is the importance of learning “how to learn from others”. ‘Others’ here refers to peers and the community at large. The reason I find this beautiful is because I’ve come across people who think that teaching is the only way to learn and teachers are the only people who can teach.

Jay Cross, writer of the Internet Time Blog on working smarter and utilizing informal learning, reviews Learning While Working, a summary report on eight years of European research grants and studies of informal learning in the workplace.

What I’ve learned (or re-learned) from reading this report is that the European Commission and we Americans have fundamentally different ways of looking at the world.

Clive Shepherd, U.K. e-learning consultant, comments on the possibility of isolated self-study to be viewed as a method of learning with a social element.

"I believe self-study could feel very much like one-to-one learning if the content was prepared with a degree of personality. Ideally that would mean you got to know who designed it, a rare occurrence for sure, but something you would take for granted in the classroom, where trainers are anything but anonymous."

Resourceful Events reports that prior to the Mining Investment & Finance Fundamentals conference (May 31 - June 2), they will be hosting a Mining 101 workshop at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Perth, WA, Australia:

"Join the Mining 101 workshop to gain a comprehensive but straight forward (no jargon) explanation of what the mining industry is, and how it works. Mining 101 is aimed at people working in associated sectors (the financial community, lawyers, PR companies, equipment manufacturers, service providers, etc) who would benefit from an overview of mining, and be in a better position as a result to develop more business opportunities. Understand the industry in just one day."

This article, by Danish e-learning specialist Helge Scherlund, aims to explore the use of Twitter in an online learning environment. With almost 200 million user accounts, the microblogging service is being used by consumer brand companies, news media, and more importantly educators.

...how can Twitter be leveraged in a learning environment? Can it replace email, message boards, and chat rooms as the preferred method of communicating with classmates?

Clive Shepherd, technology-assisted learning consultant and author of the Clive on Learning blog, reviews Jane Bozarth's book Social Media for Trainers, which covers the way in which social media can be deployed to support informal learning.

Social media for trainers isn’t really aimed at people like me, even though I’m seriously engaged with social media and, at least some of the time, I qualify as being a trainer. It’s primary focus is on the classroom (or virtual classroom) instructor who wants to enrich their offering with social learning techniques but doesn’t know where to begin. This is not a book that spends a lot of time developing a theory of social learning; this is highly practical stuff, and the better for it.

The ACG’s 2011 International Seminar on Paste and Thickened Tailings in Perth, Western Australia will be preceded by two workshops: Prediction of […]