How we got here

In many industrial sectors, the past decade hired more contractors than permanent employees, especially in the middle ranks. Hiring from universities was cut, training opportunities lapsed, and the rotational assignments that turn a competent engineer into a leader were no longer possible. Hiring was done for a specific task, not as an opportunity to grow an organization. The cost of developing people was deferred by about fifteen years, which is why we are where we are today.

The numbers are sharpest in mining, but the pattern is not unique to it. McKinsey records a 63 percent drop in mining engineering enrolment in Australia since 2014, and a 39 percent fall in United States mining graduations since 2016. The Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration counts United States mining programmes falling from 25 in 1982 to 14 in 2014. Faculties close quickly and reopen slowly. Construction, manufacturing, energy and infrastructure each went through their own version of the same decade, and each is now looking at an experienced generation heading for the door with a thin layer underneath it.

None of that felt urgent at the time. It feels urgent now. When I put together a shortlist for a mine VP Operations, a General Manager, or a Project Director, the people who should be on it are the graduates nobody hired ten years ago, or the ones who were brought in for a project and let go when the project ended. We did not lose these people to a competitor. We never brought them in.

Today there is a need to hire leaders within service organizations, within divisions of construction companies and for companies financed by private equity. We are looking for 20-year executives that have had a cross section of experience – leadership, management of P&L, business development and client facing experience. We want them to think like a general manager, running a business, managing people, and growing the organization. What we are finding is that fewer people have had the opportunity to gain that experience throughout their career so their experience is more linear, more one-dimensional. This is the gap.

Who is left

The generation ahead of that gap is leaving on schedule. Work by Deloitte and the Mining Industry Human Resources Council puts close to half of the sector's skilled engineers at retirement age within the decade, and says Canada alone needs to hire between 80,000 and 120,000 mining workers by 2030. Demand is not easing off while that happens. The International Energy Agency expects critical minerals demand to grow roughly 8.7 times for lithium and 1.5 times for copper over the next fifteen years.

The work is harder than it used to be as well. EY surveyed 500 senior mining and metals leaders for its 2026 report and found aging assets and capability gaps near the top of the list, with deeper orebodies calling for real depth in geotechnics, logistics and hydrology. Copper grades have fallen about 40 percent since 1991. Lower grades and more difficult orebodies need more capability per tonne, not less.

We are also not short of people on our own. Construction and infrastructure, oil and gas, manufacturing and utilities are reaching for the same operators at the same time, and public infrastructure spending has made that worse rather than better. McKinsey found 71 percent of mining leaders saying the talent shortage is holding them back, and 86 percent saying it is harder to recruit and keep people than it was two years earlier. The part that gets missed is the traffic going the other way. Since 2016, of everyone who left a job in energy and materials, 42 percent went to a different industry altogether. We are not just failing to attract people. We are supplying everyone else. That works both ways, if you know what you are looking for.

Most boards answer a senior vacancy by promoting from inside, and they are right to. An internal appointment comes with known performance, relationships that already work, and no cultural risk. It tells investors and the workforce that things are steady. The trouble is that promoting from inside needs somebody inside to promote, and that is exactly who we stopped developing. This is where a hiring problem turns into a board problem. A succession plan that assumes an internal candidate is resting on something the last decade quietly took away.

What actually travels between industries

Most people start a search by looking for someone who knows the sector. This is the wrong place to start. For a technical person, what travels is the discipline, and the industry is the part that changes. A geologist may move between mining, oil and gas and geothermal without much trouble, because geology is the job and the commodity is the setting. Put a supply chain executive in a geologist's role and it fails, but it fails because the discipline is wrong, not because the person came from another industry. Nobody would try that swap inside their own industry either.

So, the first question I ask about any role is a simple one: what part of this job could only be done by someone trained to do it, and what part is just the surroundings? The answer usually puts the role into one of three groups, and they behave very differently.

The discipline is the job

Geologists, metallurgists, geotechnical and process engineers. These people move between mining, oil and gas, chemicals and utilities without difficulty, but only within their own discipline. The useful part is that the pool is far bigger than the mining pool, and few are fishing in it.

The function travels and the industry can be learned

Supply chain, procurement, logistics, project controls, maintenance planning, finance. What carries across is knowing how to work at scale, with heavy capital, long lead times and a small number of very large suppliers. Someone who ran procurement on a major infrastructure build has not bought haul truck tires or bulk fuel, but they have bought things just as big and just as complicated. Learning the products takes weeks. This is where most of the available people are, and it is the group we shut out for no good reason.

The ticket is the law

Statutory mine managers, engineers of record, certified trades. There is no substitution here, no matter how good the person is. An electrician is not a plumber. These roles have to be built, kept and paid for, and everything else in a workforce plan should be arranged around them.

Why the published research seems to contradict itself

This also clears up something that looks like a disagreement in the literature. AusIMM warns that putting engineers from other disciplines into mining engineering roles increases operational risk and hurts productivity. McKinsey, looking at the energy transition, finds that skills do transfer across industries but not evenly. Both are right. AusIMM is describing the third group, where substitution always fails. McKinsey is describing the first two, where it works within limits. There is no single success rate for hiring across industries. Each group has its own, and they are nowhere near the same.

There is a fourth group worth naming, and it is the one boards worry about least and should worry about most. Some jobs need both the discipline and years of knowledge about one particular place, like the technical lead who has spent a career learning a single orebody, or the operator who knows one processing route in their bones. You cannot buy these people. They have to be spotted early and developed on purpose, and succession for them starts years before anyone resigns. The same is true of the fork that comes earlier in a career. Some become technical experts, others become people leaders. That has to be spotted early and cultivated.

A PhD in Hydrogeology is an expert in their field. There is a tendency to assume that person will always want to work in that field and that is generally a logical assumption, especially with someone with a PhD. However, that person may exude leadership behavior and a keen business sense and over time could become a strong leader in sustainability, or indigenous and community relations because they understand the strategic requirements of the role. That can only happen with a conscious effort to grow people and not just hire to get a job done.

Whether the person fits the place

Sorting the role tells you whether someone can do the work. It tells you nothing about whether they can do it at a particular company, and that is a separate problem with its own opportunity to go wrong. A supply chain leader from a large engineering and construction firm can be a perfect match on paper for a junior miner and still be gone within the year. The skills transferred. The setting and fit did not.

What changes between a major and a junior is not really the work. It is everything around the work. In a large organization a functional leader has a team, systems that already exist, legal and investor relations down the hall, and a governance process that carries some of the risk. In a small company the individual has the whole function. Nobody else builds the model. A decision that used to go to a committee now sits with them, that afternoon, with undoubtedly less information. Add to that the pace, the ambiguity, how close you are to the asset, and whether the money is in the bank or still being raised. Someone who is used to a funded annual plan has rarely worked where the runway is nine months and the financing is conditional. They have not become less capable. They have lost a support structure they probably never noticed they had.

It goes wrong in the other direction too. People who move from a junior to a major often read governance as red tape, lose patience with decisions that need four people to agree, and leave inside eighteen months. If you join a company expecting to make change but it is slow to come, you will get frustrated and leave. This is not about big company people being soft or small company people being undisciplined. Working in a particular kind of organization is a skill you learn, and not something you can read from a resume.

I suspect this is what sits behind the failure rates that make boards nervous about hiring from outside. The figures most often quoted put executive transition failure at around 40 percent inside eighteen months, and suggest up to half of senior external hires underperform in their first two years. Those come from general executive populations rather than from our sector, so treat them as a rough guide but they point to something real. You can check whether someone can do the work by reading their record and calling their referees. To hire externally you also have to ask the harder questions and test for fit with the organization. That is not a reason to stop hiring from outside. It is what happens when nobody asks the second question.

An individual who has had a successful career in a mid-to-large company will often not be a fit as a senior leader for a private equity firm even if they are of a similar size. If the PE firm is expecting a liquidity event within two to three years, a very specific type of leader is required. If they are able to wait five to seven years, another type of leader is required. The point being made is that the work to ensure a successful search outcome is completed with the hiring executive before you go into the market.

What this means if you are on a board

Find out who your internal successors actually are, by name, and how ready each of them are to move to the senior level. Where the honest answer is that there is nobody ready, that is something to deal with two years early rather than discover the morning a resignation lands.

Decide where to look group by group instead of setting one policy for everything. Open the second group up to other industries deliberately and in numbers, because that is where the people are and nobody else is looking. Search the first group by discipline rather than by industry. Build and keep the third, and budget for it.

Test whether someone fits the organization as carefully as you test whether they can do the job. That means asking directly about working without support structures, about pace, about how they behave when money is tight and information is thin. It is awkward work, because it is about how a person operates rather than what they have delivered, and it is the most useful diligence available on a senior hire.

You will rarely find a senior leader on a resume. The work is to decide what the role genuinely needs in order to succeed, and then go looking for those skills and attributes. That happens before you go to market. You might get lucky by meeting enough people, but that is not a risk worth taking on a senior appointment. This is not an exercise in showing a board a market map. It is a deliberate search for a particular set of capabilities, and the job does not end with the offer, because the person still has to find their feet somewhere they have never worked before.

What we do not know

Three things are worth saying plainly. The shortage is not the same everywhere. South Africa, for one, has more geoscience graduates than jobs, and any plan built on a global average will get a local market wrong. The sector is also still cyclical, and strong long-term demand does not mean anyone can afford to hire. PwC found the market value of mid-tier critical minerals companies down 28 percent in FY24 with earnings down 61 percent. That volatility is an argument for people who can move and have been properly assessed, but it is also a warning against straight-line forecasts.

The third is the one that bothers me most. There is no reliable published data on how long it takes to grow a general manager in this industry, or on how often senior hires from other industries actually work out. An industry that is about to depend on hiring across sectors has never measured whether it works. Whoever starts keeping track now, noting which group each hire came from and how they were doing at eighteen months and three years, will be making decisions on evidence in a few years while everyone else is still guessing.

One trap worth avoiding

There is an assumption building that AI and automation will mean we need fewer people. Autonomous haul fleets, remote operations centres, better software in every part of the business. Some of that is true, and none of it should be dismissed but it is worth remembering that the last time this industry had a good reason not to hire and develop people, the reason looked sensible at the time as well. The bill arrived fifteen years later, and we are paying it now.

Two things are worth watching. The first is that automation tends to take the entry level jobs first, and the entry level job is where somebody used to start a climb toward supervisor, superintendent and general manager. Remove the bottom rungs without putting something in their place and you have not only taken out headcount, you have taken out the training ground for the people you will need in 2040. The second is that technology usually changes the shape of a workforce more than the size of it. Remote operations, data and systems integration, a different sort of maintenance for autonomous equipment. Those are real jobs, and mostly harder ones than the jobs they replaced.

It is also worth being honest about what the technology still cannot do. It does not stand on an outcrop and form a judgement about what the rock is telling you. It does not sit across from a community and build the relationship that gets a project permitted. It does not walk a crew through a bad week underground. Exploration, development and operations are still done by people in the field, and the good ones take years to make.

None of this is an argument against the technology. It is an argument for being careful about what we assume it will save us. If the assumption runs ahead of the evidence, we will spend the next ten years being efficient and the ten after that short of people again, and somebody will write this paper a second time.

Where this leaves us

None of this is complicated. We stopped bringing people in and developing them, we did it for reasons that made sense at the time, and the people we would be promoting now were never hired. That cannot be fixed quickly. You cannot compress fifteen years of development into a search.

What can be done is to stop looking in the wrong places. There are capable people in construction, energy, manufacturing and infrastructure who could do the work in our sector, and we rule most of them out before we start because the wrong industry is written at the top of their CV. Working out which part of a job genuinely needs our industry and which part is only the setting opens up a far larger group of people than most companies think they have.

Then comes the harder question, which is whether the person will work in your organization rather than in a version of it they have never seen. That one takes more effort, and it is where most senior appointments are won or lost.

Neither question is new. We just do not ask them often enough, and the next five years will not be forgiving of that.

‍