Educating Mining Professionals 2016 MARCH 2016 School of Hard Rocks Timmins, Ontario will receive a major shot in the arm come April with the launch of the new Northern School of Hard Rock Mining, a new initiative at the Haileybury School of Mines in the northern region of the province. The enterprise seeks to educate young professionals in underground hard rock mining, a staple of the region where the iron belt stretches across central North America. Haileybury launches the school with a twelve week program encompassing nearly 600 training hours, including work with embedded crews at dig sites, allowing students to receive Canada's highereducation Common Core apprenticeships. Recycling Workers On the other side of Canada, an Edmontonbased group is seeking not to put new workers into the mining industry but rather to capitalize on those who have been left behind as the bubble burst. The group known as "Iron and Earth" will try to retrain workers who have found themselves redundant on mining, dig, and drilling sites. The Alberta oil boom has left about one hundred thousand skilled workers unemployed throughout the province, a sharp downturn from the prosperity enjoyed during peak oil prices. Iron and Earth has begun their initiative by training one thousand former employees with mining and energy agencies to become certified as electricians and fill the skills gap. The group won't stop there, and has announced plans to reveal further retraining initiatives in the near future in Edmonton that will affect even more workers who have found themselves left behind by the first Canadian recession in over a decade. Planning Big The Goodman School of Mines announced that they are launching a benchmark competition for college students interested in breaking into the mining sector, called the Goodman Gold Challenge. In this initiative, undergraduate students from Goodman as well as Laurentian University compete for a chance to impress mining CEOs and forge vital contacts in their future field. The Challenge is simple: after meeting with three CEOs, each of whose companies brings different strengths and weaknesses to the competition, students must recommend one company for the mining conglomerates to purchase in order to alleviate their fiscal concerns. This isn't a simulation or a hypothetical: the CEOs who are most impressed by the portfolio presentation by students advocating a particular company will indeed commit hard assets to the decision. The students, in turn, are rewarded for their creativity or salesmanship or persuasive capabilities by paid internships as well as stock valuation equivalent to four ounces of gold. The Goodman School hopes that the Challenge will not only draw attention to their educational strength, but also help mining businesses to find young workers with ambition and
foresight to help fill out their job openings. From Small Things Miners used the most advanced technology in the world in order to detect metal buried beneath the surface and then bring it to the light of day. Yet sometimes it's not the biggest computers or fanciest gadgets that put a company in the black. Researchers in Australia may have found a new way to test for the presence of metals in soil compositions, and it's not using lasers but rather simple bacteria. Biochemists at the University of Adelaide have discovered how to use bacteria that cycle particular metals, such as iron as well as platinum and copper, to determine whether or not a particular stretch of soil has enough minerals to justify exploration. At dig sites in both Australia and Brazil, these scientists have discovered formations using bacteria samples that cycled metal. It's still a long way to go before they can apply a bacterial swab to a piece of dirt and say that it's worth digging, but the team hopes to find new ways to use the micro life forms to explore for new metal deposits.