Industry Overview
The Extractive and Mineral Processing industries are is vital to our everyday lives – all around us, they provide the essential raw materials for use by the construction industry, agricultural, manufacturing and the energy production industry. The industry also provides substantial revenue from the export of kaolin and ball clay.
The Extractive and Mineral Processing industry employs around 34,100 employees.
The largest concentration of employees can be found in the East Midlands and West Yorkshire.
Around 56% of the people in the industry work on sites with fewer than 50 employees.
Proskills works with employers from the Extractive and Mineral Processing Industry to help businesses improve their productivity and competitiveness through skills training. Extensive research and comprehensive employer consultation has identified a need to upskill current and future workforces to enable businesses in this industry to address the challenges they currently face. In particular as the current economic climate forces many businesses to make staff cut backs, there is an increasing need for the remaining workforce to multi-skill.
Skills training is required to help business address the following:
- Skills shortages are particularly prevalent among front line staff, technical staff as well at managerial and supervisory level
- To help businesses ride the storm of the current economic climate and credit crunch, particularly with respect to the downturn in the construction trade
- The need to meet constantly changing consumer demands and preferences and an increasing expectation for quality customer service
- To support legislation compliance on Health and Safety as well as Environmental Management
- To improve efficiencies by tightening up processes to tackle the issue of rising energy costs and the need for more energy-efficient machinery and processes
- To drive business performance improvements to increase competitiveness
- To keep up with changes in processes and technical technology
- Consolidation, acquisitions and company restructures
- To support business growth in an industry where flat or low growth is prevalent