YMP Scholarship: Mining’s greatest upcoming challenge? Another lost generation

The following essay was chosen as the winner of The Northern Miner’s 2025 Young Mining Professionals Scholarship. 

Ten years ago, in the face of considerable economic turmoil, mining companies across the world put their graduate programs on pause. In Canada, many of these were never restarted-and most of their web pages still exist, frozen in time, almost as if to taunt young people knocking on the industry’s door.

Today, it is challenging to find a mining conference program that does not include some discussion of the pressing need to attract Gen Z to the industry. As a Gen Z mineral processor, I believe these discussions both underestimate the severity of the upcoming labour shortage facing the industry and rarely consider the true challenges faced by students interested in mining.

 

When searching for my first industry co-op term, I attended a job search workshop where we were told that finding a new role is a numbers game, and while we should tailor our resumes and cover letters to each posting, we should expect to apply to more than fifty postings to be invited for one interview. Since then, as the tech market in particular has stagnated, I have heard that figure increase to more than two hundred applications per interview. Regardless of the accuracy of those numbers, the common wisdom remains: to get a job, you must apply for many. Yet when I attended that workshop, I had already applied to every mineral processing and metallurgy co-op posting available on both public and university-sponsored databases, and it had taken me far more time to compile the twenty or so postings – using every possible variation of the terms “mineral” “process” and “engineering,” as each one seemed to use different terminology – than it did to apply. My classmates faced the same challenges, and it seemed from the student perspective that the jobs simply were not there.

Invest in Gen Z

It is understandable that internships are in short supply, in part due to the shuttered graduate programs of previous bust years: many of the students who could not find their place in the industry in the mid-2010s would today be senior engineers, themselves leading those programs and developing the next generation. The ripple effects of this shortage of mid-career talent are evident, and certainly challenging to overcome, but something must be done to stop the bleeding: the industry must invest in Gen Z, before they too find greener pastures and repeat the cycle for Generation Alpha.

This kind of investment in intergenerational collaboration will mean that many of the other challenges the mining industry faces in the next 10 years can double as opportunities. Take mining’s aging workforce: globally, it is 6.3 years older than average. That means retirement looms for many, and with that will come a massive loss of institutional knowledge. By hiring young people, we evidently minimize associated labour constraints, but more importantly, their curiosity promotes knowledge transfer. While it is easy to find numerous articles calling Gen Z lazy and unsociable, my experience is the opposite: after spending more than two years confined to our computer screens over the Covid-19 pandemic, most of us are keen to strike up conversations and learn outside that box.

Tough spot for industry

Compounding predicted labour shortages, the industry finds itself between a metaphorical rock – demand for minerals and metals, particularly critical minerals, is set to skyrocket in the next two decades – and a hard place: the popular impression of mining as a major social and environmental pollutant. Unchanged, this situation is expected to hinder or prevent the significant investment needed for the new discoveries, new mines, new processing methods, and other new technologies needed to increase global mining capacity. 

Here, Gen Z’s acknowledgment of mining as a flawed industry is, perhaps counterintuitively, invaluable. Broadly speaking, our generation has been defined by its determination to improve social awareness, environmental outcomes, and workplace inclusion, all of which could significantly better the industry’s reputation while putting mining on future generations’ radar. These priorities also make many of us passionate about developing new technologies to minimize waste and increase efficiency. By giving Gen Z workers a voice and a place in the workplace, all these possibilities come together to not only build leadership capability for the green transition, but to attract new investment in the mining industry.

This puts us at a crossroads: while Gen Z could have a great impact on mining, we’ve been left out so far. At the same time, the industry cannot afford to lose another generation, especially in the face of imminent labour shortages and capacity squeezes. Investment in young workers is no longer an option-it may be the best way to avoid the worst case scenario in the next 10 years.

Towards a better industry

That investment looks like a better mining industry. It is in research, development and innovation, realized by acknowledging that young people’s desire to change the world is an asset, not a threat. It is in continued safety advancements: not only the physical but the psychological, community, and environmental aspects of safety. It looks like marketing the industry where and how it matters to show younger people the unique opportunity mining affords to positively contribute to the green transition. And most concretely, it looks like the return of meaningful graduate and apprenticeship programs, with rotational opportunities and clear paths to desired roles to maximize the benefit to both employee and employer.

Industry-wide, the cost of onboarding Gen Z is far from material-but the impact of losing another generation could define it for decades to come.

Marion is a PhD student at Queen’s University, co-supervised by Drs. Charlotte Gibson and Qian Zhang. Her interest in mining was sparked during a co-op term in mineral processing, where she saw the opportunity apply strategic thinking and engineering to impact a field central to modern life.