By NICK STEWART
Making the move from national offices in Ottawa back home to Northern Ontario, Paul Hébert is due to help reduce the human resources drain facing the mining industry by serving as the Federated School of Mines’ inaugural executive director.
Hébert, who left Sudbury 18 years ago to pursue post-secondary studies in Ottawa and never left, has spent the last 11 years serving in a variety of senior roles at the Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR).
As the former executive director for MiHR, a national organization dedicated to addressing workforce and labour issues for the Canadian minerals and metals industry, Hébert says the move to his new role is a logical one.
“It was really a natural sort of progression for me to move from this prior role to the Federated School of Mines,” Hébert says.
“It allows me to move firmly to the implementation side of things where I can really get involved with delivering some of those solutions.”
As a partnership between the six Northern Ontario colleges, Laurentian University and Contact North, the Federated School of Mines represents virtually the same interests and issues as those faced on a national level by MiHR, Hébert says.
Chief among those problems is the fact that the industry will need 92,000 new people over the next decade all across Canada, with 40 per cent of today’s workforce due to retire in that same period.
Part of the role of education and training institutions then is to facilitate transfer of the existing intellectual capital to the next generation and mitigate impact of the loss of this considerable experience base.
As the centre for a great deal of the country’s mining activity, Northern Ontario is already painfully aware of this keen need for new blood, and the potential loss of experience and productivity it may bring.
As a result, many key partners from industry and the Federated School of Mines are already willing to work towards this goal, and Hébert’s experience in bringing together diverse players each with their own objectives and values will be key, he says. What’s more, he’s already seen that industry is eager to look at working with training institutions to ensure that the right people get in the right place at the right time.
While it’s still much too soon to peg down specific action plans, having officially settled into his new position on Feb. 25, Hébert says he already has some broad ideas about things he’d like to move forward.
One such plan includes helping to develop innovative approaches to training delivery to people in areas where distance may be a barrier to education. The long history of delivering mining-related studies at places such as Cambrian College, Laurentian and the Haileybury School of Mines need to be somehow brought to a wider audience, Hébert says, and institutions such as Contact North may provide the answer.
Hébert also hopes to use some of the natural overlap of his past and current positions to help with the development of a national credentialing program, where miners could easily transport their skills across the country much like tradespeople.
The benefits to be seen from this potential interconnectedness between MiHR, the Federated School of Mines and industry are many, he says, and are only enhanced by the many networks that are already in place.
“Luckily, there’s already a sense of goodwill and a strong recognition that all players can provide an increased value to industry and to the public by working together, rather than going it alone,” Hébert says. “These are huge economies of scale, and together we have the opportunity to bridge long distances and to engage in a broader and more meaningful dialogue.”
