Open Letter to Millennials
Drive real change for the future through mining
To sustain and advance modern society, there is no way around it: we need minerals. So it’s a chicken and egg situation. Our future depends on minerals, but to access and extract these, we need mining.
Mining companies are actively looking for tech-savvy professionals to transition the industry to an automated and digital world. They are proactively looking for talent outside of mining to innovate and are training their workforce to be digitally ready.
It will take more than beefing up the team with tech-savvy people and change agents. With the rapid shift to AI, automation and digitization, experience may become less critical. Knowledge however remains crucial. Understanding mining and its processes must be paired with quintessentially human traits: intuition; the ability to contextualize, interpret, and question data; as well as empathy and communication. These will be the keys to enable machines to crunch and digest data into meaningful outputs and make business decisions.
Here’s a thought: why not focus your career on driving real change and make mining more sustainable through technology?
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2 Comments
Millennial
The reason why millennials are not interested in mining is due to location, very low starting pay compared to other industries and shoddy managers who know absolutely nothing about the process and do not deserve to be a manager. I’m a millennial and I was in the mining industry for 4 years before I left for manufacturing. Better pay, way better work life balance and the bosses are great. I’m salaried but I’m also paid for overtime. I have plenty of friends who are millennials who also have left the mining industry due to the reasons I just discussed.
If you want millennials to go into the mining industry, get rid of all managers who are universally despised (trust me, those are easy to find. Ask rank and file), increase starting pay and increase vacation time since mine locations are usually in the middle of nowhere.
Vancouver Miner
You are asking someone to come in and clean up your bedroom for you. Miners and those who manage mines literally have no clue on how to generate and structure their data. Every mine is a rat’s nest of unstructured, error riddled excel sheets that are sacred cows made up by someone 10yrs ago. Every mine.
I agree with Millennial – you will need to carve out some budget for this work.
Mines also clutch to this notion that they are ‘unique’ and ‘special’ and that you cannot possibly take their ‘complex’ systems and process and shoehorn them into some data tracking system. Not to mention everyone is a skeptic of the last half dozen times some contractor came in to manage their data in a system which failed the minute they left site. Every geologist and engineer needs their own special excel sheets to tell their own little story of what is happening at the site.
We’ve given the mines nothing to manage data, save for excel which comes complete on every PC. And…. Presto! What did you expect?
Miners need to ask themselves how they want to retain their earnings to re-invest in the business. Do miners ‘REALLY’ want to go through this painful transition of creating reliable, consolidated and structured data? Do they?
Ask yourself the question before asking a millennial.
I think the market is fed up with the industry’s unreliable results which is a directly caused by unreliable data and story-telling. My guess is that the boomer zoomers are content getting their head office pay checks and validating the technical story-tellers rather than cutting headcount and getting real with their data.
Don’t expect millennials to put on a cape and come clean your own bedroom.
Ask yourself if you want it cleaned up in the first place.