Ask an operations manager where a mine’s bottlenecks are and they’ll rarely point to HR. They’ll talk about too few surveyors to meet planning demands or supervisors having to carry understaffed crews. But those pressures often originate upstream, caused by a staffing model built around backfilling rather than long-term planning.
Too many mines take a reactive approach to workforce planning that makes it hard to identify long-term gaps or show how shortages in key roles impact productivity.
The alternative? Create a strategic workforce plan. It will allow you to forecast upcoming work, test if your current workforce can deliver it, and use staffing and attrition trends to see future problems that could affect the mine’s performance.
The result is a clearer line between people and production. You can anticipate recruitment problems early so they can be addressed long before the impacts are realised.
Annual workforce planning leaves mines exposed
Part of the problem lies in how workforce decisions are made. When positions are approved during the annual budget cycle, that structure tends to stay in place. It doesn’t adapt to new work conditions that have changed later in the year.
That’s why attrition is usually treated as a problem to be solved quickly rather than a lever to reshape the workforce. Vacancies get filled one by one, and usually like-for-like where the replacement has a similar profile to the people who left.
Over time, this locks an organisation into a stagnant workforce.
“Once you’ve set your roles and set your budget for roles, you tend to be quite restricted by what you have,” says workforce strategist Jon Wilson, Director of 3Pillars Asia Pacific. “For a steady state, that’s normally pretty effective. You keep on top of your vacancy rate, you replace like-for-like skills. If those skills are relevant, then you’re okay. If those skills are undercooked, then issues quickly emerge.”
There’s a common assumption that as long as a mine has a solid business case and a clear project plan, the right skilled people will be available. However, “Not acting early enough might leave you significantly short of a new workforce that you require, and effectively double your recruitment costs as you react with urgency when gaps are realised,” he says.
The work changes long before the workforce does
A fixed workforce structure sits at odds with the reality of mining where work changes constantly. Some shifts are obvious: a transition from open pit to underground, a new ore body expansion, or changes in commodity prices. Others happen in the background, for example, you could have a major services contract up for renewal and you want to redo the economics of in-house versus outsourced.
These changes alter the type of work, not just the headcount.
“If you’re a multi-operation company, particularly in the same geography, you might need to top up your skills and move skills between sites. Even in your corporate offices, the emphasis of what you’re doing in the market could mean you need more skills to deal with your investor base, work with communities to get ahead of new projects, and get land access.”
Investment in new technology amplifies this. Mines bring in automation, fleet technology or new processing equipment, but the workforce profile often remains anchored in a more traditional model.
“If you’re investing in technology,” Jon says, “but you’ve got a very traditional, skilled, labour-based workforce, only a small proportion of that workforce may be able to modify ways of working to take advantage of your technology.”
Without a plan, the mine ends up with a future-focused mine plan and a legacy workforce. Even when production targets are met, those legacy skill sets are both a cost and a limitation.
“Any major change in the work needs to be matched by a change in the workforce if you’re going to optimise the outcome,” Jon says.
Without strategic workforce planning, few organisations have a systematic process to adapt to this.
The cost of discovering gaps too late
A reactive workforce approach limits your options when a skills gap is discovered late. You’ll:
- Rely more heavily on consultants or third party contractors
- Compete harder for the same small pool of people
- End up paying more
“If your skills are undercooked, you either get things wrong or you delay,” Jon says. “You inflate costs because you end up going to consultants more than you do to in-house skills.”
In expansions or ramp-ups, those delays show up quickly in production figures.
How strategic workforce planning works
Strategic workforce planning focuses on the work itself, outside of the in-year cycle.
“The ideal version,” Jon says, “is that you start with a forecast of work demands, and then you match the workforce to the work. So if the assumptions of our future work are X, then the workforce required to match those demands is Y.”
That forecast needs to go beyond a single year. Jon recommends forecasting in the two-to-five-year window, with some mining companies looking 10 years ahead for major changes.
“Then, any workforce forecast should be quantified into the number of positions by job family,” he says, “maybe even by skill level or experience level. You need to segment your workforce for this to be effective. It’s not helpful to know that we’re going to be 300 people short in three years. You need to know which roles, doing what work, at what level. Then you can create effective strategies to address the gaps.”
Once the gap is quantified, the question shifts from ‘will we be short?’ to ‘what will it cost us if we are short, and what are our options to avoid that?’ Knowing the likely productivity and financial impact of the gap means you can then build a business case to put strategies in place to handle it.
Those strategies could include:
- Earlier recruitment
- Targeted development programs
- Over-resourcing key roles for a period
- Or redesigning roles to make better use of existing skills
For example, you might be 30 geologists short of what you’ll require. If the work of half of those geologists doesn’t get done, what’s the impact on your ability to keep mining?
“One method is to wait until the shortages hit, then go on a big recruitment campaign and try to steal everyone else’s geologists. But, you’ll pay a premium,” says Jon. Compare that to a development and progression plan, with mid level or early career geologists that can be trained up to do that work.
The miners that do workforce planning well, ask a different question: “Is there actually a commercial benefit for us to train a group of 30 geologists, cover their salaries, set them free on our sites, and over-resource geologists for two or three years? Is that a better overall position than finding ourselves with a shortage we haven’t done anything about?”
At that point, workforce planning stops being a qualitative debate and becomes an investment case.
Why don’t more mines do this already?
If this sounds more like a planning or finance exercise than a traditional HR task, that’s intentional.
Most HR work is centred on people and process: policy, compliance, employee support, coaching, and day-to-day problem solving.
“HR is very humanistic,” Jon says. “Good communication, empathy, support, coaching and advice for leaders, but not often mathematical.”
Site HR teams also operate under constant strain to keep up with recruitment, support leaders, and manage industrial issues.
“It’s hard for on-site teams to come out of the pressure of that environment and really forecast forward,” he says.
Corporate HR teams sometimes attempt future-of-work style projects, but these can become abstract exercises that don’t translate into clear numbers.
Strategic workforce planning demands a different skill set to apply economic forecasts to a workforce lens, build formulas to link work to roles, and separate generic assumptions from specific, testable ones.
“You create a formula that says, based on this work, we’re really confident that the composition of the workforce is predictable,” Jon explains. “And we’re really confident in how that differs from today.”
That analytical layer is where many mining companies bring in external support to help build the model, and hand over a framework that internal teams can maintain.
Keep updating the model
A strategic workforce plan, once built, is a model you update as the mine’s assumptions change.
“Each year you might refresh your three-year view or your five-year view,” Jon says. “So that you continually have this view of: I know what my current workforce is. I know what my gap is. I know what my strategies are to fill my gaps. I know how effective my strategies are in addressing the gap because I have the forecast from a year before.”
This numbers-driven analysis of capacity and capability is what mine executives are used to seeing in other parts of the business. If you apply the same thinking to your workforce, it allows you to make decisions earlier and with more confidence.
Plan your workforce like you plan your mine
Mining companies value long-term business planning. It’s embedded in mine design, capital planning, and production strategy, so your workforce planning shouldn’t be any different.
Too many mines still rely on annual budgets, reactive hiring and hopeful assumptions about future skills availability. And that leaves them open to delays, higher costs, and under-realised technology investments.
With a strategic workforce plan, you see your workforce as a strategic asset with the same level of analysis and discipline as any other major investment.
That way, you’re better placed to meet changing operational demands, adopt new technology, and sustain performance long term.
