While Australia's mining industry has enjoyed steady growth, it's also been hampered by skill shortages, attraction challenges and retention struggles. Using Aruspex's CAPTure software, a government-industry partnership has gathered important insights about workforce trends and is planning for the future.
Formed as a collaborative venture between the Australian government and the mining industry, the Mining Industry Skills Centre was founded in 1996 with the goal of addressing future training needs, and developing and implementing skilling initiatives for the Australian resources industry. The Skills Centre formed the "Heartbeat Project" to identify role-, sector- and method-specific skills shortages within the mining space. Before then, individual companies tracked their own workforce data and no central clearing house existed.
When the Skills Centre needed to input the information into a software system that could handle industry-wide data, they turned to Aruspex, a leading strategic workforce planning firm, and its CAPTure (Capability, Availability, Productivity of Talent) software. The Skills Centre chose CAPTure to run future workforce scenarios and modeling based on external factors such as demographics, business strategies, competitors' behavior, and other factors inside and outside an organization.
Results from the first phase of the project have provided insights into industry averages that haven't been available before. The next phase of the project will provide more extensive data, spanning more than 30 job roles, and incorporating more companies from various locations across Australia. Once the right future is identified, CAPTure will lead Heartbeat Project officials through comprehensive action planning to set goals and track progress.
"Our primary mission is to develop a skilled and sustainable workforce for the future," explains Jenny Neumann, strategic development manager for Mining Industry Skills Centre. "We needed a system that could automatically upload data from multiple companies and provide an industry profile of our workforce, such as median age and gender profiles by job roles. CAPTure presented current workforce trends and showed us where the industry skill sets were going if nothing changed. The scenarios explore the real world, and represent the gap between the industry's current workforce and the workforce they will need—and in turn how these trends could change, based on the various actions we take."
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"The critical insights gained by using CAPTure have helped the mining industry not only plan for the future, but to build the future," explains Tess Walton, co-founder of Aruspex. "This project will allow the Skills Centre to map workforce demand against supply and model it over the next three to five years—so the industry can mitigate the risks of gaps by hiring staff, training existing staff, or changing the way work is structured to suit available talent pools."
The project is the first to apply such an approach to an entire industry, not just individual businesses. The Skills Centre is now expanding the Heartbeat Project to wider parts of the industry; by helping competing companies to collaborate in the critical area of talent shortages, the Skills Centre is helping the resource and mining industries build a sustainable, affordable future.
About Aruspex
Aruspex delivers strategic workforce planning solutions that help organizations design and attain their future workforce. Our intuitive CAPTure planning software goes beyond simple reporting; it analyzes internal and external demographic trends, identifies future workforce gaps and guides executives and HR professionals to solve different scenarios. The Aruspex model was developed through years of practical experience, and we are passionate about workforce planning. For more information, visit www.aruspex.com.