How maintaining learning in the mining industry brings benefits

Today’s mining exploration sector is a changing landscape requiring a workforce with the agility to stay on top of, and ahead of, these changes. Ongoing learning in the workplace equips both the company and its staff.

A learning culture

A learning culture is defined as when an organisation is able to create, acquire, and transfer knowledge quickly, and modify its behaviour to reflect that knowledge.

Encouraging continuous professional growth creates a mutually progressive environment that ultimately benefits the employer and empowers employees. Research has shown that it also inspires loyalty in employees.

In the ledger, staff training is certainly a cost. However, employers should approach it less as a training cost and more as an investment in performance and progress.

Continuous learning means more informed staff who work with an air of empowerment, which equates to increased productivity.

Changing expectation

Within five years, millennials, digital natives, will comprise the majority of the global workforce. Their expectation towards technology standards is changing and they are driving changes in the mining industry because of these expectations. Having grown up with a culture where full information access is the norm, ongoing development of their knowledge base and skill set, is automatically assumed.

A survey conducted by PWC highlighted, “Millennials expect to keep on learning as they enter the workplace and spend a high proportion of their time gaining new experiences and absorbing new information. 35% said they were attracted to employers who offer excellent training and development programmes for this reason and saw it as the top benefit they wanted from an employer.”

Mode of learning

The costs involved in progressing and maintaining staff knowledge is vastly reduced by online and virtual learning options. These options offer ease and flexibility for learning opportunity. With particular regard to the natural resources mining industry – where employees may be located in every corner of the globe – online options can bring that learning opportunity right to their laptop, whether they be in the Egyptian Western Desert or the Gulf of Mexico.

acQuire’s GIM Suite Learning

acQuire’s GIM Suite Learning is an accredited learning program. It offers a flexible training approach designed to help develop industry-leading GIM professionals.

GIM Suite Learning participants benefit from all the elements of a globally-recognised program but with a new capability to choose a learning platform and delivery method best suited to their learning style.

Each GIM Suite Learning course builds on outcomes from the previous course, creating a tailored, career pathway.

For more details on our learning courses, please visit GIM Suite Learning.