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A ROADMAP FOR MINERALS PROCESSING EDUCATION

Under the stated scenarios, employability would reach an optimistic
scenario at 43% employability (with three times the employment projected
by Large Scale Mining and 40% retention of first year registration), while
in the pessimistic case the employability would be 12% (only with the
employment projected for Large Scale Mining and 50% retention of first
year registrations).

In Chile there has been an important drop in the employability of recent
graduates according to an article in “El Mercurio” newspaper, in which
inquiries were made at several recruiting companies such as First Job,
Page Personnel, and Adecco Profesional. According to this “mining supply
companies are those that have mostly restricted their offers of untrained
people between April 2013 and April 2015 by 93%, followed by mining
companies, with a drop of 77%...” (El Mercurio, 2015).

A survey made by the Psychology Institute of the Pontificia Universidad
Católica for the National Youth Institute (Instituto Nacional de la Juventud)
(Instituto de Psicología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2014)
shows a trend of young people preferring nowadays a good working
environment, a good relation with their colleagues, and satisfaction
with the work they are doing. Because of the characteristics mentioned
previously about mining professionals must face, it is imperative that those
who choose to study mining engineering do so by real vocation, since the
near future is uncertain and it is highly probable that there will be low
employability. It would be regrettable for someone to study something
that they do not like only because they believe that they will get a high
salary, wasting their financial resources that are often scarce to pay for
their career and end up unemployed a large part of their life.

It can be inferred that in a scenario with low employability there will be two
important effects: a substantial salary drop, reaching values even lower
than those of 2006, and on the other hand, with so many offers of available
engineers, they may displace to current mining technicians, occupying or
competing for the positions that they occupy, such as nonprofessional
foremen and supervisors. A possible third effect may be added, which is
the migration of professionals to work in other countries.

Analysis of Labuor Sustainability for 109
Mining Engineers in Chile