Who tells our story?
Hayley McGillivray: There is a long history of the mining industry addressing both its talent shortfall and reputational challenges. In essence, the young people coming through do not feel compelled to study or work in our sector.
While narratives about our role in critical minerals for decarbonisation are growing, we still don’t see people flocking to mining-centred degrees. So what else have we failed to communicate, or perhaps failed to consider?
Anil Subramanya: That question points to something deeper than a messaging gap. The mining industry has ceded the story of itself to its critics. Law has its justice narrative, medicine its healing one, technology its innovation mythology – stories powerful enough to pull people across the threshold.
Mining’s dominant story – extractive, colonial, dangerous – is a partial truth that has crowded out the richer, more complex one. Those stories exist. They are simply not being told with conviction, at scale, and by the right voices.
The invitation arrives too late
HG: The data reflects this starkly: just 1% of young Australians are interested in mining careers, 73% believe it does more harm than good,¹ 40% of STEM students lack a clear understanding of the modern industry² and 70% globally were not considering it.³
Recently, presenting a challenge to university students, the assumption was that people join mining for big salaries. I personally have found a range of other motivations in people who join the industry.
AS: Those figures represent the end of a much longer chain of decisions. The choice not to study mining is rarely made at university; it is made at age fourteen or fifteen, shaped by teachers, career advisors and family experience.⁴ Sustained, genuine relationships between industry and secondary schools, not one-off visits, are the intervention we are not having.
Belonging can’t be communicated into existence
HG: Gen Z seek purpose-driven careers, belonging and future-focused skills.⁵ Crucially, 61% believe mining could be sustainable.⁶ The door is not closed. It may simply not have been opened in the right way.
AS: Belonging is not something that can be communicated into existence, it requires a room designed to hold the person who walks into it. Fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) rosters, camp infrastructure not designed with women or people with disabilities in mind and cultures that can make difference feel like a liability: these are what people who leave describe to others.⁷
Every dollar invested in communicating and belonging while the underlying culture remains unchanged is borrowed time.
Who else have we failed to invite?
AS: But there is a more generative dimension. Indigenous knowledge systems – deep ecological understanding, spatial reasoning about country, long-cycle environmental observation – are forms of expertise this industry needs and has historically ignored.
At Rio Tinto’s Amrun mine, rehabilitation is being conducted using native plant species identified by Wik-Waya Traditional Owners from generations of knowledge about how country heals.
This is not a cultural goodwill story. It is a capability story. An industry that repositioned Indigenous intellectual traditions as assets it needs, rather than sensitivities it manages, would transform its relationship with a growing demographic of potential talent.
HG: The World Economic Forum suggests 22% of roles face AI disruption, with the highest risk on entry-level white-collar work.¹° Does our industry, perhaps unintentionally, offer something increasingly rare – careers where early experience is grounded, practical and automation-resilient? And could mining offer a pathway for those being displaced?
AS: As automation reshapes white-collar entry points, it will produce a cohort of educated, adaptable people reconsidering what they want from a career. Data scientists, environmental scientists, engineers from adjacent sectors… many capabilities mining now needs at scale exist in people who have simply never been invited to consider it, because no bridge has been extended.
The power of the mirror
HG: In my own experience as a late-diagnosed ADHD person, my degree was going very badly… until I undertook an international year with significant field trips. That shift to experiential learning changed everything.
We do not all learn in the same way, yet we rarely speak about the diversity of ways to learn and work within this sector. Multi-modal learning is best practice for learner variability¹² and geoscience has been described as an inherently multimodal discipline.¹³
AS: That passage is the most powerful thing in this paper. Not for what it says about neurodiversity, but because it gives readers who have felt out of place a mirror and the quiet sense that someone like me found a place here.
This is what the industry has most consistently underinvested in. Story does what statistics cannot. And Gen Z can tell the difference between a corporate testimonial and a person genuinely describing what their working life means to them.
The invitation we keep forgetting to extend – a closing perspective
HG: Have we forgotten to invite Gen Z, and others, into a sector that offers multimodal learning, AI-resilient early career pathways, and the chance to work at the intersection of deep time and urgent present?
AS: These questions are exactly right. And I want to add one more, which I think sits beneath them all: not only have we forgotten to invite, but have we been clear, even to ourselves, about what we are inviting people into?
The talent crisis is, if we choose to read it that way, a mandate. An industry that must reckon with why it is not attracting the people it needs has been handed a forcing function for transformation.
Many young people who are not joining have looked clearly at what this industry is and made a rational assessment. If we want a different answer, we may need to become a different industry; not in what we extract, but in how we operate, who we value and what we stand for in the communities where we work.
There is something I have always found quietly profound about this field that rarely gets said aloud. Mining works at the intersection of deep time and urgent present, reading in rock the story of billions of years and connecting that story to the technologies that will define the next fifty.
That is not the description of a dying industry. That is one of the most interesting places a thinking, curious, purposeful person could spend their working life.
We have simply forgotten how to say so, and perhaps, in some quarters, forgotten how to believe it. The invitation, in the end, is not a campaign. It is the lived reality of the people already here.
If we are to extend it credibly, we must first do the interior work: to understand what this industry is at its best and to build the conditions in which that best becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Written by Hayley Mcgillivray and Anil Subramanya, inspired by conversations at the Amira Global Exploration Managers Conference.
Anil Subramanya has over 30 years experience in the mining sector and research and development and specialises in governance and making molehills out of mountains.
Hayley Mcgillivray is currently completing her PhD at the University of Queensland and has a history of over 20 years working in the mining sector and on university -industry collaboration.
Endnotes
1. Australian Minerals and Energy Academy (AusMASA) (2024), Gen Z Perceptions of Mining.
2. Sandvik & Fast Company (2025), Who Will Do the Work?
3. McKinsey & Company (2023), Mining Talent & Workforce Shifts.
4. UCL Institute of Education / Ipsos MORI (2018), Drawing the Future; MiHR (2021), National Youth Mining Career Awareness Strategy 2021-2026.
5. Deloitte (2024), Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
6. AusMASA (2024), as above.
7. AusIMM (2024), Diversity and Inclusion Survey 2024; ICMM (2024), Tools for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
8. Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia (2021), A Way Forward: Final Report of the Inquiry into the Destruction of Juukan Gorge; Doohan et al. (2022), The Extractive Industries and Society, vol. 9.
9. Rio Tinto (2024), Weipa Operations; OECD Cogito (2024), Indigenous Peoples in Mining Regions: From Compensation to Collaboration?
10. World Economic Forum (2025), Future of Jobs Report 2025.
11. ICMM (2023), Position Statement: Indigenous Peoples and Mining.
12. CAST (2018), Universal Design for Learning Guidelines; Springer (2024), multimodal learning and knowledge outcomes.
13. Applied Linguistics (2024), geoscience as a multimodal discipline; National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT), Geoscience Education Research Framework.