South Africa is the major educator of mining engineers in the English-speaking world yet few graduates in this field work for an extended period in the country. This means the pool of skills is still not great enough to meet demand despite a substantial increase in investment since 1994.
Now Gold Fields Limited, the world’s fourth-largest gold producer, has injected R26-million into the mining engineering faculties at the universities of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg. A recent survey by the Landelahni Recruitment Group found that ‘South Africa remains the major educator of mining engineers in the English-speaking world.
The country produced 304 mining engineers in 2008, compared with Australia’s 130, Canada’s 127 and the United States’s 35.” It also found that ‘mining engineering graduates have increased from 260 in 2006 to 304 in 2008” but it is still widely believed that there is a crisis in the industry.
‘Developing countries are at a much bigger risk of losing skills,” said Sandra Burmeister, Landelahni chief executive. The culprit, she said, is cross-border contract work and emigration as ‘engineers are drawn to sexy projects”. And the relatively poor value of the rand also contributes to the loss.
‘We are a cheap source of quality skills.” The survey found that 85% of mining engineering graduates do not work long term in South Africa. ‘We are going to continue to lose our skills to international projects,” she said. ‘That is not going to change — and we need to plan for it.”
Peter Knottenbelt, head of the department of mining engineering at the University of Johannesburg, believed the figure of 85% raises troubling questions. ‘Are we the exporter of skills? Are we educating for the world?” he asked. ‘We should be educating for South Africa.”
Professor Frederick Cawood, head of the Wits school of mining engineering, said he was aware that the industry experiences the skills shortage in different ways but ‘we experience it at the school — in trying to fill our high-level positions”. ‘It is increasingly challenging to find qualified lecturers,” he said.
Sven Lunsche, Gold Fields spokesperson, said the company has incentives to keep engineers in the country. ‘We try to incentivise them with things such as share options and bonus schemes — We also give them interesting projects to work on.”
But as an international company Gold Fields can accommodate local mining engineers on overseas projects. ‘If they want to leave, we can give them that option,” said Lunsche.
But, Burmeister said, ‘a retention strategy is certainly something we need to look at”. We cannot stop training mining engineers simply because they might leave, he said.
Jeremy Michaels, spokesperson for the department of minerals and energy, said the department is ‘extremely concerned about the shortage of skills in the mining sector. It is obviously crucial for the sustainability of the sector for us to develop and reclaim the necessary skills.”
He said the government, business and labour have been working jointly on a strategy ‘for sustainable growth and meaningful transformation of the industry”. ‘Skills are a priority and a comprehensive strategy” will be finalised by the end of this month.