Coalface to the cloud
BHP looks to a cutting-edge, tech savvy future workforce
BHP is on a major recruiting rebrand, as profound technological change increasingly moves the company’s employment needs from the coalface to the cloud.
The Big Australian wants to become an employer of choice for all school leavers by showing prospective hires the mining industry is “so much more than a white middle-aged man in a hard hat with a dirty face”, according to Athalie Williams, BHP’s chief people officer. Instead, it’s a place where “cutting-edge jobs and leading technology” allow employees to do “work that makes a difference to both Australia and the world”, she says.
It’s a recognition that as the miner looks to unlock productivity gains, its workforce will need to have digital expertise. BHP wants to be a leader in the technology space and sees technology as key to achieving volume growth at the low end of the cost curve.
It’s an industry-wide concern. A report by the Minerals Council of Australia and EY found that $35 billion needs to be invested in technology, and about $5 to $13 billion in soft skills such as leadership, collaboration, change management and human resource management, over the five-year period to ensure the sector remains productive.
BHP wouldn’t specify the amount of investment required, but Williams says about half of its workforce will “need some form of programming, computer science and technology skills” by 2030.
“We need people with data analytics skills who can use data to inform decision making,” she says. “People with the skill set around continuous improvement, along with their engineering and technical skills. So they are coming to the fore. Even our entry level roles are going to require a higher skill level, and that’s everything from truck drivers to maintainers to geologists to engineers.”
But the pipeline of qualified people is not there. According to the Minerals Council of Australia’s Future of Work report, only 34 students enrolled in first-year mining engineering at the leading mining universities – University of Adelaide, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and Curtin University.
By comparison, in 2012 there were 267 first-year enrolments. Modelling from the Minerals Council of Australia suggests that the industry needs more than 200 new graduates annually to replace natural attrition in the workforce.
And those graduating with science, tech, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees are a hot commodity, meaning the recruitment process is highly competitive.
“STEM graduates have a lot of choice these days,” Williams says. “It’s not just BHP and Rio Tinto and Qantas and Telstra. It’s also the banks, it’s the consulting firms, even some of the legal firms are all going after this skill set.
“We’re not seeing significant salary bidding yet, but we know that young people make decisions based on the type of work they’re doing. Will they get to solve problems early in their career? Will they be given accountability? Are they working for a company that is aligned with their values? And so some of the work that we do in the social value space through the BHP foundation and our community investment programs are programs our people are really proud of.”
Over the past five years, the BHP Foundation has invested $55 million in Australia to support the pipeline of STEM-interested students before they choose their university degree. One partnership with the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute is specifically targeted at getting more girls to study STEM via the Choose Maths initiative. It is funding professional development for teachers, curriculum resources, scholarships, and an awards program to recognise excellence in both teaching and learning.
That investment in female education is critical if BHP is to meet the aspirational target of gender parity in its workforce by 2025. Williams says the company still has a “long, long way to go”, but the current technological change allows for a complete reimagining of how jobs are performed at the company. Executives have been touring manufacturing plants around the world to adopt “lean manufacturing” techniques, and workplaces that previously were a male-only domain are now safer, cleaner, more productive – and importantly, female-friendly.
Williams cites a maintenance workshop for the company’s 10,000 rail cars. Using lean manufacturing techniques, robots were installed and heavy equipment suspended from the roof, taking away the “brute strength” element of the job.
“It used to be a cavernous, heavy engineering workshop that required brute strength to undertake some of the tasks. We leveraged technology from the bottom up, which enabled us to think about the design of work and bring people who’d never worked in the sector and had them working side-by-side with people who’d had decades of experience,” she says.
“We’ve been able to create an incredibly diverse and much more energised workforce. We’ve created rosters that enable people who were living locally to still pick children up from school. And we’ve gone from a workforce of about 5 per cent female –and they were really ad hoc administrative roles – to well north of 30 per cent.”
And the promotion of women into previously male-only jobs is not just window dressing, according to Williams.
“We have run our own analysis and we know that our teams that are most inclusive and diverse have better safety outcomes,” she says. “Lower ‘total recordable injury frequency rates’, higher productivity, lower absenteeism and higher engagement. So on the things that matter to the bottom line of the organisation, our teams that are more inclusive and diverse perform better.”
Williams is aware of the large task ahead in terms of recruiting the next generation of technologically savvy workers, and wants to work with governments, educational institutions and other industry players to address the challenge.
“We need to start a much more integrated conversation about what skills Australia needs and what role industry can play,” she says. “I’d much rather see us engage in an integrated partnership focused on some of the big challenges facing Australia for the next decade. How do we solve this so that we don’t need an ongoing reliance on skilled visas to bridge gaps in the workforce? I think that’s part of reshaping Australia. And so for me one of the exciting opportunities we have is to play a small part in that conversation.”
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