“My view is that the industry has to do more to create awareness of career opportunities in the minerals industry,” said Minerals Tertiary Education Council executive director Kevin Tuckwell. “There is no collective program to attract people in to the industry. Individual companies have their own strategies and some will tell you they have no trouble attracting people and others say they do. It is a very individual thing.”

As pointed out in a recent report by the University of Queensland’s Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre and the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, mining industry people are not being lured away from their existing employers by other job opportunities. Rather, they tend to be dissatisfied with their situation. Human resource managers needed to nurture their skills base and realise the detrimental effects of high workforce turnover at mining operations, the report said. The study also showed fly-in/fly-out sites had the highest turnover rates, particularly among professional and managerial staff.

The introduction of fly-in/fly-out operations was initially seen as essential to attracting young people into the mining industry. But the lifestyle was really only attractive to singles, said Western Australian School of Mines Kalgoorlie student representative Helen Sarcich. “FIFO offers an attractive lifestyle to some, but many students would not choose a FIFO job when they have families, as they place a large amount of pressure on them,” she said.

Ultimately, though, it came down to personal choice, and graduates knew what a mining life entailed, said Tuckwell. “There has been a fair amount of discussion about the impact of FIFO operations on families and communities and things, but what it gets down to is that people choose to apply for those positions or not apply for them,” he said.

Students in tertiary minerals courses seem resigned to the idea. “At my age I have few commitments and am not phased by the lifestyle. I think if a person has a problem with the lifestyle they should find an area within the geology field that better suits them,” said a first-year geology student at the University of Tasmania.

But a mining engineer in Queensland who now works as an applications engineer with an equipment supplier said FIFO presented a particular challenge for the industry. “I feel overall that FIFO is only a short-term solution for a select group working in the mining industry. FIFO at the end of the day has been driven by companies looking to develop deposits which would have otherwise been uneconomical (FIFO reduces infrastructure costs). So if we reduced the FIFO operations, what would be the overall effect on the job prospects within the industry?”Australia's Mining Monthly