The industry is working with Aboriginal groups to train and mentor future mine workers
If you're a northerner looking for a job in mining, it helps to know where to start. A perfect place is one of the Mine Training Society's workshops: So You Want a Job in a Mine.
The Mine Training Society in the Northwest Territories is an incubator-style project for the future of the North, enabling its resources, its people and the potential of both to come together, learn and build. It was started in 2003 to deliver training for workers at the first diamond mines in the Northwest Territories.
Since then it has provided training, career counseling or both to more than 1,900 northerners, placing more than 830 people in high-paying, fulfilling jobs.
It's called a society but it's really more of a partnership, with Aboriginal communities and other northerners, governments and the mining industry working toward the same goals. The Society's help in finding long-term employment starts with training, but it hardly ends there; it helps place people in jobs and sticks with its clients through mentoring and coaching throughout their career.
The Society's initiatives, such as its Mining the Future project, are key to ensuring that Aboriginal people can gain the full advantages of coming opportunities. In the Northwest Territories alone, three active mines already employ more than 2,900 people, and there are eight mining projects well into development and expected to go into operation in the next few years.
The expected NWT job boom will bring nearly 5,000 mining positions and another 9,000 support or indirect jobs to the Territories by 2017. At the same time, the mines that are now active, Diavik, Ekati and Snap Lake, are expected to reach the end of their active cycles within 15 years, meaning there will be a need for more jobs in reclamation and remediation.
New workers need skills. Equally important, training helps people who develop skills gain the confidence to do the job. Workshops like So You Want a Job in a Mine are community-led and confront issues such as low education rates, the need for job readiness and training and underlying social issues that have traditionally hampered Aboriginal entry into higher paying work.
The Mine Training Society also offers community-based programs with Aboriginal communities in the Dechco claim area near Fort Simpson, a geoscience field assistants' training program and a partnership with next-door neighbours in Nunavut's Kitikmeot Inuit Association (KIA).
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