Johannesburg — THE growth of SA's mining sector could be hampered further by a serious lack of professional skills, according to a survey by executive recruitment firm Landelahni Business Leaders, released yesterday.
The shortage of skills in the sector coincided with an upturn in the global economy and a recovery in world commodity prices, which meant that the South African mining sector could miss out on the full benefits of the recovery.
The local mining industry is already battling higher production costs, and the strong rand during much of last year has seen most miners unable to optimise margins despite higher metals prices.
Landelahni CEO Sandra Burmeister said what was even more worrying was that the local industry had lost much of its skills development capability.
"SA, despite being a large mining-driven economy, was unable to take advantage of the commodities boom earlier this (past) decade due to low growth in mining production. Factors such as skills shortages, long lead times in delivery of equipment and electricity were cited as the main reasons," Burmeister said.
"As global economies recover, we must ensure that our future supply of minerals is not constrained by the same factors that inhibited supply during the last boom. To achieve that will demand a focused skills development programme, driven by sound research to supply the data - currently either hard to come by or totally lacking -- to make sound management decisions."
She said the situation was made worse as the mining industry was competing for scarce skills with demand from the infrastructure development sector, manufacturing and other local industries as well as the global mining sector.
"Engineers and artisans are highly mobile due to transferability of their skills. SA is known for its top mining expertise and is likely to continue to be a preferred poaching ground for mining talent.
"Although we produce more mining engineers than all other English- speaking countries combined, we are not producing sufficient skills to replace the ageing engineering and artisan population, let alone to gear the industry for growth," she said.
The survey showed that over the 11 years between 1998 and 2008, enrolments for degrees and diplomas across all engineering disciplines totalled 388606, against 53342 graduations.
This was equivalent to a pass rate of just 13,7%.
"While we have substantially increased the number of enrolments since 2004 - close to an additional 10000 in the year 2005 alone - we are not seeing the corresponding proportional increase in students completing their studies," Burmeister said.
The Landelahni survey noted that only 15% of mining engineering graduates in SA remained in the industry in the long term, compared with 75% in the US and 80% in Australia.
Most of South African mining engineers ended up joining financial services or became contractors, consultants and suppliers of mining equipment in return for higher remuneration, Burmeister said.
