News & Media

April 2008

PUTTING SKILLED PEOPLE IN POSITION TO TACKLE LARGE MINING PROJECTS

The shortage of people skills South Africa continues to suffer from is one with which the entire world currently does battle. This means that training and upskilling of people becomes an ever more critical need.

Concor Mining has invested a large amount of capital and time in both upskilling existing personnel as well as attracting new staff who can add value to the company’s resource pool.

Trevor Robinson, managing director of Concor Mining, tells Mining Weekly that to remain a top contender in the competitive opencast mining contracting arena, the company continually addresses issues such as matching individual personnel with the appropriate experience and training to specific projects as well as providing the teams with the right tools (equipment) to perform their designated tasks.

“I believe that in terms of our current equipment holding, the ability to source new plant and our core of experienced personnel, we are well positioned to carry out projects that require moving 1 million cubic metres of earth a month. Significantly, in terms of our current projects we are achieving exceptional safety statistics on our sites with a very low lost time frequency injury rate (LTFIR) being recorded to date,” Robinson says.

“We believe that training across the board is a critical aspect of our approach to safety. Our emphasis on safety and training is the starting point of entrenching a culture of doing things right the first time.

“With regard to all aspects of training, we acknowledge that a balance between theory and practice has to be implemented. All our training is conducted in-house as we have struggled to find suitable external courses that will complement what we find is necessary to ensure productive and safe operation in our environment,” Robinson adds.

Concor Mining is an MQA-certified training provider with MQA and therefore all its training is conducted through an ISO 9001:2000-approved management system. “This ensures that operators are competent and as such they receive recognition in line with SAQA-approved unit standards,” Robinson explains. “Even after qualifying, our machine operators are taken through regular refresher courses and assessed to ensure safe and productive operation on site.”

Robinson says that hand in glove with having a team of skilled and competent people in place, is the ability of our employees being able to apply their skills in the workplace. “Our personnel are all thoroughly versed in the environments in which they operate. This ensures that they will provide our customers with best practice results, i.e. delivering the cleanest ore safely and on time.

He says there is definitely a need for the company to get involved at a far earlier stage to ensure optimum mine design for the client. “This is coupled to the expertise that resides within the company. Getting involved early on gives a higher level of confidence at the feasibility and/or bankable stage.

“The fact that our parent company, Murray & Roberts is prepared to invest in the expansion of our business, coupled with the concomitant increase in the size of our already-large base of knowledge and experience, means that we are strongly positioned to successfully complete large-scale mining contracting projects,” Robinson concludes.