Why I Have Made It My Mission To Connect With Every Mining Engineer In Australia

If you type the words mining engineer into LinkedIn and limit the location to Australia the search shows around 5,700 people. Not that many when you consider the scale of the Australian mining industry. This is just enough people to fill 11% of Suncorp Stadium or only 6% of the MCG. It is little wonder that as the industry heats up we are all struggling to find resources from such a small pool of people. It does however, raise some interesting questions:

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THE MINING MILLENNIAL – MEC Mining’s model for the future

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m a millennial. I am driven by the desire to feel like I’m contributing, adding value, respected. All admirable qualities, but as anyone who has employed a millennial knows, there is a down side. I, like many of my cohort, have left employers in the lurch, just as I’m starting to fit into their grand plans, I’ve gone and put my notice in, like a 25th minute red card, forcing a backline reshuffle.

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What I have Learnt From The Last 1,000 Interviews

Owning and leading a business for over 10 years has taught me a thing or two about interviews and has certainly sharpened my intuition for picking the best candidates. During the 10 years we have hired over 150 people, interviewed around 1,000 people face to face and screened at least 5,000 candidates. So what has been so special about the 3% of people that have applied to us that we actually employed?

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NPV trap

Net present value (NPV) is the universally accepted tool for measuring the value of a mining venture. We spend a lot of effort maximizing the NPV by changing all sorts of parameters. Essentially, NPV just converts future cash flows back into today’s dollars by compounding the discount rate ( think interest rate ) into the future. NPV discounts early cash flow less and later cash flow more. Usually, any cash flows that are more than 15 years away are attributed negligible value in today’s dollars.

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Lunch and Learn: Envirosuite

Join us for a free lunch and learn session with Andrew Shek, Strategy and Business Development Asia Pacific-Envirosuite.

EnviroSuite is an innovative, proven technology platform developed to facilitate the management and rapid interpretation of environmental data across water, air and noise. EnviroSuite won the Australian Technology Competition in 2015. It is an integrated, cloud-based system for aggregating, analysing and displaying real time environmental data in a simple, intuitive, portable interface. Used by a wide range of industries and organisations globally, EnviroSuite helps to proactively manage environmental outcomes and risk using high resolution weather forecasting, real time sensor systems, blast and dispersion modelling.

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Championing sustainable diversity in the workplace

BHP’s commitment to seeking out excellence in mining and setting itself an aspirational goal of achieving a 50/50 gender balance by 2025 company-wide, has recently reached an impressive milestone. New figures show that women now make up a fifth of its 26,000-strong workforce, an increase of 3 percentage points in the year to June 2017 (Hume, 2017).

In light of this inspiring achievement, MEC Mining General Manager of Strategy and Business Development, and Committee Chair of Women in Mining and Resources Queensland (WIMARQ), Maria Joyce reflects on not only the benefits of a diverse workforce, but also the challenges that are likely to accompany these ambitious aims.

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