In-house training

SCAFFOLDING and equipment hire company Pilbara Access has developed an in-house Aboriginal employment-training program to guard against skills shortages and improve indigenous engagement.

Pilbara Access has run three courses of its Aboriginal Development and Employment Program since it established the program 12 months ago, with 30 people having been involved.

The business operates predominantly in the Pilbara and teamed up with Aboriginal mining training specialist BYAC in Perth to develop a strategy to get participants from the Noongar community involved in the training program.

After eight weeks of the 25-week course, participants are put on the Pilbara Access books and employment is guaranteed at the end of the course; the retention rate of participants after three courses is better than 70 per cent.

The course is focused on scaffolding skills and building mentoring capacity in individuals, who gain a construction white card, basic and intermediate scaffolding ticket, forklift licence, confined space and working safely at heights training, and health and safety training specific to Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

“It is not run through at a high rate, it is a step-by-step process, so the guys get a proper understanding. It is not about mass, pushing the guys through as quickly as we can,” Pilbara Access managing director Stephen Easterbrook said.

“It is about ensuring these men, at a steady pace, gain a proper and mindful understanding of health and safety, then the scaffolding and the trade we are empowering them with.”

Participants are flown to a site in the Pilbara for training and are ‘buddied up’ with a tradesman for the length of the course. Once they complete the course they are mobilised across numerous Rio Tinto and BHP sites in the Pilbara, to various Pilbara Access client sites in Karratha, and Newmont’s Boddington Gold Mine.

Mr Easterbrook said the development of the course had improved the business’s access to skilled labour.

“We identified that there is a skills shortage coming on, and we identified there is a group of Aboriginal people who can be fostered, developed, and trained into quality, skilled labour,” Mr Easterbook told WA Business News.

Nine per cent of the Pilbara Access workforce is indigenous, and while Mr Easterbrook said corporate social responsibility was important, it was not the main motivation behind Pilbara Access developing the employment program.

“This is part of our business, we don’t look at it as a key performance indicator, per se. We don’t push it as a business strategy in regards to trying to get work,” he said.

“To see these guys go through the courses, the training and the program and achieve significant and meaningful accreditation and certification, to give these guys gainful employment is gratifying in the respect that, that is what we like to build. 

“More than a KPI, it is a group of guys that has job satisfaction and can embrace the mining industry like anyone else.”