While industry players agree relevant experience and qualifications are what resource sector employers wanted, responses varied on the topic of safety personnel shortages.

Wilson People Management, a supplier of occupational health and safety specialists to the mining and allied industries, reports that it is struggling to keep up with the demand for qualified and experienced mine safety personnel.

Operations manager Kevin Husler told Australia's Mining Monthly: "There's so much work around [but] there are so few professionals around. There's a whole lot of people that could take permanent work now that are only taking contract work because of the hourly rate.

"I suppose like a lot of professional industries at the moment, they're seeing a boom and historically occupational health and safety has been human resources' poor cousin but at the moment [it's more of an issue] because of the legislation and obviously you can see a bottom line to occupational health and safety."

However, Downing Teal resource and construction recruitment division DT Workforce general manager Lincoln Padberg rejected the notion of a mine safety skills shortage and said quality safety personnel could still be found by those who truly wanted them.

"They can be found," Padberg declared. "We haven't had a problem, we've been able to find them. It depends on where, when, how and the type of job [that's being offered].

"Nothing's easy at the moment but to say that there's a mass shortage of that particular category of people, I don't think is right. If you've got a good job [to offer], you can find a good safety professional. It's all related to price pressures, rosters, location, type of job and seniority of job."

Melbourne-based Macro Recruitment consultant Motty Sobol described demand for mine safety staff as sporadic and said that any difficulty in sourcing safety professionals usually came down to the specifics of the job on offer.

He said the agency's database - not conventional job advertisements - was the more likely place to find suitable safety personnel.

"If you’re asking, if I put up an ad tomorrow will I get someone applying, probably not, because most of the guys are either well settled in or they've already got established patterns so they don't generally look at the ads," Sobol told AMM.

"As a general rule of thumb we've got a sufficiently large database that we can safely rely upon to get us out of maybe 80 percent of assignments, so at least 80 percent of assignments are from people we already know."

Despite the different takes on recruitment challenges, industry players agreed the mining boom had significantly increased demand for skilled safety professionals. In addition, recruiters observed shifting industry attitudes toward safety.

Padberg said minesite safety had undergone a palpable shift in the past eight years or so, moving from an authoritative "safety guru" style of operation, to a more holistic integrated approach.

Echoing these thoughts, Wilson People Management managing director Ben Wilson said changing attitudes and more rigorous safety legislation had developed a stronger safety mentality within the Australian mining industry.

"A lot of these organisations, especially the larger ones, are thinking real safety culture throughout their whole organisation," he said. "It makes up a major component of their overall risk management strategy, and organisations are looking for people, especially the senior safety people, who have a good understanding of overall risk."

In addition, Wilson said, a genuine commitment to industry safety could add value to the company and foster staff loyalty.

"Businesses have to be seen to be thinking safety culture," he said. "A good safety professional can see that when [safety] is integrated as part of the whole risk management portfolio, it gives the business more value."

Wilson staff reported a fair amount of salary bidding wars among some organisations chasing skilled safety professionals.

As well as throwing the chequebook around, Wilson said industry was looking at alternative approaches to filling any safety staff gaps such as the identification of university graduates, providing safety training to existing staff and being more open to the transferable skills of prospective employees.

Husler gave a recent example of a mining client that had successfully employed a non-mining industry experienced safety professional. He said the new recruit had never visited a minesite before but possessed valuable safety experience as well as the right interpersonal skills gained from working in the manufacturing industry.

In this situation, the employee was placed in a more junior role and given further training specific to mine hazards and safety issues.

Husler said he had observed a trend towards speedy upskilling of existing mine employees. While providing training to existing mine personnel was not a complete solution to the safety staff shortage, it was, he said, another way for workplaces to improve their occupational health and safety environment.

"They're digging as fast as they can and in the building and construction sector they're building as fast as they can," Husler said. "Obviously the same risks are prevalent in these industries and to keep up with this, they need to upskill and a lot of them are upskilling a lot quicker than they ever have [before]."

Both Husler and Padberg pointed to the number of Australian expatriate mine safety professionals returning home to fill positions.

In spite of the different experiences the overall feeling from recruiters was that any difficulty in sourcing suitable staff was very much dependent on the specific requirements of a specific position.

Whether finding them or keeping them, Sobol had this to say about the challenges of recruiting safety professionals: "If you treat people decently you find that you don't have much trouble getting them - and it's not hard to keep people if you treat them well."

Published in the August 2007 Australia's Mining Monthly