Employment trends changing but little improvement for geoscientists

Its latest survey shows a strong trend towards shorter shifts and a fewer hours in the working week, a strategy being used by companies to retain staff while cutting costs.
AusIMM chief executive Michael Catchpole said, “Given the industry’s exposure to cyclical changes and reputation for shedding staff, it’s perhaps surprising that trends for 2009 in both salaries and employment remained relatively steady.
“The average base salary was approximately $167,000, with a median of $145,000. Compared with the 2008 survey, this average is $8,000 higher, but the median is unchanged, suggesting that there has not been a significant increase in salaries over 2008,” he said.
Over a quarter of respondents to the AusIMM survey (27.4 per cent) indicated that the downturn had led to a reduction in salaries at their workplace, with 18.6 per cent having been encouraged to take annual leave. A total of 3 per cent of respondents indicated that they had been made redundant.
The changing trends have not all been good news though for geologists and geophysicists working in mining industry. The latest geoscientist employment survey conducted by the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG) revealed little improvement in the dramatic downturn in employment prospects for Australia’s geoscientists that have plagued the profession throughout 2009.
The AIG said that some 18.7 per cent of professional geoscientists are currently unemployed or underemployed.
This represents a decrease from 20.2 per cent recorded three months prior to the latest survey, and 24.5 per cent at the beginning of 2009, following the onset of the global economic downturn.
The decrease in unemployment amongst geoscientists employed by companies has, partly, been at the expense of self employed geoscientists - across the profession, 8.8 per cent of geoscientists are unemployed and 47.1 per cent of self employed geoscientists are either unemployed or underemployed.
Mineral exploration remains the hardest hit sector of the profession where the unemployment and underemployment rate is 21.1 per cent.
The AIG said programs implemented by several state governments and aimed at curbing a downturn in resource industry employment, provided no tangible support for geoscientists in exploration and mining.
AIG Vice President, Andrew Waltho, said the latest figures - coupled with the downturn in exploration expenditure reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics - point to a lack of investment in the future of Australia’s resource industries.
“This is troubling at a time when Australia is looking to the resource sector to underpin it’s recovery from the global economic downturn,” he said.
“Both Commonwealth and State governments need to act to promote exploration to maintain the project pipeline that is critical to the sustainability of Australia’s resource industries.
“Measures to promote exploration investment, notably flow through shares, and improve access to land for exploration, something that has become ensnared in red-tape in recent years, require urgent action.”
Waltho said that each downturn in the exploration and mining industries also contributes to a loss of skills, as experienced geoscientists seek alternative employment, with many of them not returning when industry conditions improve.
“This in turn reduces our capacity to deal with important geoscientific issues including management of groundwater resources, urban and engineering geology, assessment and mitigation of geological hazards, environmental remediation and even climate change,” he said.