Resource News
Hiring picks up as mining industry growth returns
By resourceINTEL · December 4, 2009 · 9:10 am · Leave a Comment
WHAT a difference 12 months makes. This time last year, Australia’s resources sector began mothballing projects and laying off staff as the once-booming industry prepared to ride out the global financial crisis.
More than 12,000 Australian redundancies were announced nationally, led by mining giant Rio Tinto, which cut about 16,000 jobs globally.
Now the resilience of Australia’s economy and continued demand from China has renewed confidence throughout the sector.
Companies are back on the hunt for staff, with mine expansion plans and massive oil and gas projects fuelling demand for international and local workers.
The iron ore sector is expected to flourish on the back of plans for expansion by BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals Group.
As well, the booming oil and gas sector is starting construction on multi-billion-dollar projects.
Fortescue Metals Group executive director Graeme Rowley said it appeared the job cutbacks as resulting from the global financial crisis had been absorbed back into the market.
“That fallout has been taken up, so the market has returned somewhat towards normal,” he said.
“We are OK as far as operators are concerned and we continue to be able to recruit successfully in the semi-skilled area.
“We get a sense that the Gorgon demand is already in the marketplace and starting to mop up any spare trade competence, so trading is starting to get a little bit difficult, and in a general sense you can feel it getting tighter every week.”
Lucy Bowes, who recently joined Fortescue at its Cloudbreak mine in the Pilbara in a newly created role as contractor management specialist, said she had witnessed many hiring cycles in the sector.
“Having seen it before, it didn’t really concern me when it started slowing down again, knowing full well it was another cycle we were going through and that once you get through that, off it goes again,” she said.
The 36-year-old said workers in the mining industry believed the sector had recovered quite quickly from the impact of the downturn. “Companies are now looking at projects and expansions again,” she said.
Global mining giant Rio Tinto made some tough cutbacks to cushion the impact of the financial crisis, but the usually conservative company is back to focussing on growth.
The miner’s $US1.5 billion ($1.6bn) Brockman 4 mine, near Tom Price in the Pilbara, is ahead of schedule and up to 400 new employees are being sought for the project.
Rio Tinto talent management global practice leader Narelle Crux said the global giant had “picked up” its recruitment in the past six months.
“There has been a fairly progressive and steady improvement with levels of recruitment, while clearly not at the peak they were 15 to 18 months ago,” she said.
“We have been surprised but pleased with pickup and our recruitment teams have been responding to that and we’ve been able to recruit good people.”
Extremely large salaries were used to poach staff during the boom years and graduates were being offered jobs before completing their studies. Despite the renewed recruitment drives, it is expected to be some time before that situation recurs.
Globally, salaries had fallen, Ms Crux said. In some instances, senior executive salaries had dropped 30 per cent in the past 12 months.
Predictions were difficult, she said, but she did not expect to see “some of the madness of the previous year” in the foreseeable future.
Demand for employment packages that included training and development opportunities were now more attractive to prospective employees than the “cash grab” experienced during the boom, she said.
Rio Tinto Iron Ore human resources vice-president Joanne Farrell said salaries for operator maintenance roles generally did not drop but they would grow more slowly,
Concerns about critical skilled labour shortages are starting to re-emerge, but most large companies maintained their long-standing graduate programs during the downturn.
“We have continued investment in university scholarships and programs, and that means it is unlike the late 1990s, when we were genuinely at risk that universities would be cutting mining programs,” Ms Crux said.
Ms Farrell said it was unlikely that the deep the skills shortages experienced 18 months ago would be repeated.
Over the next six months there would be “some skills shortages but they will be quite specific, because the growth is quite specific”, she said.
A shortage of construction engineers and capital project managers was likely, she said.
“But 15 or 18 months ago we saw some competing mines come on, and that’s not in the near-term future for us, so the competition will be the large capital projects, which require specific skills,” she said.
The massive oil and gas projects in Western Australia and Queensland are leading the charge for new recruits.
The $43bn Chevron-led Gorgon liquefied natural gas project will create up to 10,000 jobs directly and indirectly during peak construction, which is scheduled to start in the second half of next year. Woodside will be competing for staff from the same talent pool, with its $13bn Pluto LNG project.
First gas from it is targeted for late next year and first LNG production is expected in early 2011.
Woodside senior human resources manager Lesley Adams said the company had been fortunate not to have been affected by the downturn, as recruitment continued during the past year.
“We continued to recruit through 2009 and have had more than 450 new employees join us in the last 12 months and we’ll continue to recruit at that level,” she said.
The company was preparing for Woodside’s growth and over the past few years had put in place an organisational improvement plan focussed on leadership training, Ms Adams said.
“We are not only recruiting for growth but also holding on to the workforce we already have,” she said.
“Woodside was smart enough to learn from the sins of the industry’s past, so when there was a downturn, even though we weren’t impacted by that.
“The key thing was engagement and communication at all times.”…read more at The Australian
