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Preparing Students Through Internships, Professional Development, and Mentorship
Preparing students for the mining industry typically involves a multifaceted approach encompassing internships, professional development opportunities, and mentorship programs. Internships provide critical hands-on experience and interactions with industry, while professional development activities enhance workers’ skills and knowledge. Mentorships are also important for retention because they help those who are new to the industry navigate their career paths and develop any missing skills needed to thrive in the mining sector. To examine different models and considerations for such activities, Antonio Arribas, The University of Texas at El Paso, moderated a session on internships, professional development, and mentorship. The session included flash talks highlighting different examples of technical and skilled trade programs, which were followed by a panel discussion on what makes a successful experience that best prepares their students for careers in mineral resources fields.
FIELD TRAINING FOR MINING AND SAFETY TRADE SKILLS
Bill Bieber, Mining Petroleum Training Service for the University of Alaska Fairbanks, described his organization’s primarily noncredit programs providing hands-on experience in mining and oil and gas development. The organization’s flagship program, the Underground and Surface Mine Training program, brings skilled trade students to remote mining camps, where they engage in hands-on training in a variety of areas and observe the blasting process. The underground mining class is a 4-week (280-hour) experience, while the surface mining class is 2 weeks (140 hours). Participants are housed at a 32-bed camp facility and learn at a fully outfitted training complex located about a mile into a mountain.
Bieber explained that the program is designed not only to teach mining and safety skills but to provide participants with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the workplace. “The success of the program really has a lot to do with not just teaching the hard skills, but also teaching the employability skills side of it,” he said. This includes teaching participants how to work as a team and communicate across cultures. Bieber suggested that many students today struggle with face-to-face communication, whether because of their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic or because of the influence of technology, and the program begins with a focus on general life management and communication skills.
The program is accessible for people with families and other obligations not only because it is short in duration, but also because it is free of charge for the student. Employers recruit participants, offer a letter of employment contingent upon program completion, and cover the cost of the class. To date, 519 participants have completed the program, 42 percent of whom are from minority groups. “We change lives,” Bieber said. “Our program has allowed us to be able to bring folks into the mining industry that would have never had an opportunity before, because we focus a lot on the underemployed, and that’s a huge demographic out there that is seriously untapped.” The program has a good track record, with 95 percent of participants completing the class and starting employment with a mining company and 87 percent staying in their jobs long term. Today, program graduates comprise 30 percent of all underground miners in Alaska, which Bieber said has helped to drastically slow the turnover rates in the region’s underground mining industry.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MENTORSHIP FOR THE MINING WORKFORCE
Cat Joyner, Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) and John T. Boyd Company, described SME’s workforce development activities. The organization has eight divisions representing var-
ious disciplines in the mining industry, along with a foundation that leverages resources for outreach programs and Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation. SME works to prepare students for the minerals workforce through a variety of programs, including the Minerals Education Coalition that provides resources for K–12 teachers; support and networking opportunities for student chapters and competitions; and a mentorship program that matches students with experienced professionals. In addition, the organization has awarded $1.5 million in scholarships to more than 200 students in the past 10–12 years, including over $9 million to the Ph.D. Fellowship and Career Development Grant program that encourages industry–university collaboration. In addition, SME was a founding society for the Emerging Leaders Alliance, which formed in 2008 as a partnership among leading engineering and science-based organizations that provides high-quality leadership training.
Joyner shared results from a survey that SME sent to the National Science Teachers Association and the American School Counselor Association that provided insights about perceptions of the field among these professionals. About 40 percent of the science teachers and 60 percent of the school counselors who responded to the survey work with high school and postsecondary students. Overall, the results showed that the people who offer career advice to high school students do not have enough information about mining, Joyner said. Only about a quarter of respondents said they were knowledgeable or know a little about the minerals industry, while almost 50 percent of the science teachers and almost 60 percent of the school counselors said they knew nothing or very little about the industry. Very few respondents said they would be inclined to suggest the minerals industry as a career path, but over two-thirds said that if they had more information, they might be open to suggesting this to students.
To help build awareness of the positive impacts and future potential of mineral resources and related fields, SME contributed to a docuseries called Jobs of Tomorrow, which is now streaming on several services. The series is designed to attract young people and has been viewed over 4,600 times, with more than 1,100 viewers watching up to 75 percent of the episode. The top-viewed episodes have been “Mining 2.0: Progress and Innovation in the Industry,” “Sustainability Gold: ESG1 in Mining,” and “Mining Data for Mining Innovation.” Finally, SME’s “Down for That” initiative, run by the Underground Construction Association (UCA), a division of SME, is designed to inform students about the underground construction industry through resources and opportunities to get involved. It costs approximately $11,000 per year to run, and Joyner said that it has been a major success. “One thing I’ve noticed is that mining has all these different organizations, and we’re not coming together to really do anything collaboratively,” she said. “Down for That has been very successful because it’s a collaboration between UCA and several other national and international tunneling, engineering, and geosciences organizations.”
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MENTORSHIP FOR THE ECONOMIC GEOLOGY WORKFORCE
Simon Jowitt, University of Nevada, Reno, provided an overview of the Society of Economic Geologist’s programs aimed at supporting professional development. The society, which began over a century ago in the United States, now has 6,100 members around the world, about one-quarter of whom are students and three-quarters of whom are based outside the United States.
The society’s professional development programs include multiple traveling lecturer programs through which universities around the world can request visits from experts who give talks about various aspects of economic geology, as well as webinar series to provide an online and globally accessible option for tapping into this expertise. The society’s mentorship program connects senior or midcareer scientists with students and others seeking mentorship. In addition, the society offers applied workshops covering a variety of topics with academic and industry partners and awards about $200,000 in student research grants yearly to support M.Sc- and Ph.D.-level research.
The society also offers a variety of field trips and field training programs that can help meet the need for exposing students to field work and mine sites. These programs include a student mapping course,
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1 ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance.
in which students are taught about mapping, alteration, and understanding mineralizing systems in the field. There are also field trips and other workshops associated with the society’s annual conferences, and the society distributes about $80,000 per year for student chapters to hold field trips and visit mines.
Surveys of those who have participated in these programs indicate that mentorship programs, networking opportunities with industry partners, and toolkits for navigating the industry (such as through resume development and career-pathway mapping) are particularly valued by students and early-career professionals, who also express a particular interest in hands-on and applied learning opportunities. Moving forward, Jowitt suggested that more industry engagement would be valuable in providing students with access to expertise, projects, and educational resources. He underscored the importance of fostering strong relationships and collaborations that bring students, academia, government, and industry together, and added that more funding and sponsorship would be useful for facilitating student and early-career professional participation in these programs. “We don’t just want to support students, we want to support their transition from students into the workforce,” he said. “That early-career professional piece is really valuable.”
INDUSTRY-LED INTERNSHIPS AND PROGRAMS
Dan Pearson, Coeur Mining, described programs and partnerships to enhance early career engagement and professional development at Coeur, a Chicago-based precious metals company primarily mining gold and silver. The company has about 2,100 employees and four active mining operations in North America.
A key activity is the company’s Summer Technical Intern Program, which has provided approximately 100 summer internships over the past 5 years in areas such as mining engineering, metallurgy, environmental science, geology, and health and safety. During this 3-month internship, students work on a specific project with a dedicated supervisor. They also hear from business leaders who share advice on careers and having a successful internship. At the end of the summer, the students from all the mine sites come to Chicago to present a group project to the company’s executive team.
Another initiative, the Summer Skilled Trades Program, was designed to reduce turnover at Coeur Mining for mechanics and electricians and to help close the talent gap due to retirements. Additionally, the Co-op Program is a fairly new program, which offers an expanded internship program opportunity that lasts 8–12 months. Students in this program work on a specific project related to a technical need the company is facing at its mine sites.
Pearson said that Coeur Mining has developed purposeful relationships with local and regional schools, including the 14 mining schools across the United States and some in Canada. The company also collaborates with Women in Mining, Women in Science and Engineering, and the National Society of Black Engineers to help ensure the participants in its programs are diverse. For the past 5 years, 50 percent of the students within the company’s early career programs have come from diverse backgrounds, Pearson said.
PANEL DISCUSSION ON INTERNSHIPS, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND MENTORSHIP
Prompted by a question from a participant, panelists discussed ways to build a robust workforce pipeline not only for engineers and scientists, but also for skilled trades, which are essential to mining operations. Joyner said that the SME Workforce Committee is currently creating a certificate program for skilled trades as a pilot project. Bieber said that in Alaska, a number of programs focus on education and training in the skilled trades. He noted that organizers work collaboratively and meet monthly to discuss changes and what’s going on in the industries, though he added that funding is always an important constraint in running these programs. Jowitt added that fostering linkages among different types of educational institutions, including community colleges, trade schools, and universities is an excellent way to develop those parts of the workforce. He said that the University of Nevada, Reno, is active in this area and noted that organizations such as Nevada Gold Mines also recognize the importance of preventing a skilled trades gap and provide support for such efforts. Pearson added that his company has made about four full-time
employment offers to students in the Skilled Trades Intern program and stressed the importance of continuing to invest in such programs.
Participants also discussed pathways for supporting the faculty who will educate the next generation of the mining workforce. Aaron Noble, Virginia Tech, pointed out how valuable the SME Ph.D. Fellowship and Career Development Grant program has been, noting that at least five former recipients were among the participants of the workshop. “To say that this had an impact on the educational landscape would be a drastic understatement,” he said. He attributed the program’s success to industry–academia alignment on the issue of needing more mining faculty, and to its focus on one thing: raising funding to support grants and Ph.D. fellowships. Arribas commented that academics who have experience with industry are needed and suggested that the Society of Economic Geologists could help support the transfer of people from industry back to academia. “There are many of us who have done that, and we need more,” he said.
Another participant asked panelists to comment on the scale of the funding needed to solve the problem. Jowitt responded by saying that throwing money at a problem and hoping for the best is not the best way forward. “I think understanding what those action items are, what impact they have, and maybe look around and learn from other countries where similar actions are being taken and see what happened after those actions, because we don’t want to replicate or reproduce the wheel, especially if that wheel ends up being square in shape rather than round,” he said. Building on this point, Joyner called for collaboration to cut down on unnecessary redundancy. “There are a lot of us doing the same thing,” she said. “We’re collecting the same data; we’re putting together programs that have the same purposes. But we’re all doing it separately. And imagine what we could do if we all came together and streamlined the process and worked as a collective group.” She suggested that one way to facilitate this would be to organize all the mining interests into a central agency like the former U.S. Bureau of Mines, which she suggested could also be the source, or at least a supplement for, funding workforce development programs.
