There is a version of the same request that comes up a lot in engineering and mining recruitment. Someone with solid experience behind them, ideally a decade or so, comfortable on site or in a project environment, ready to contribute from day one. No real appetite to train someone up. Just the person who is already there.

It makes sense on paper. Time is tight, projects are live, and bringing someone in who needs six months of handholding is a real cost. But that person, right now, is one of the hardest people in the country to find.

What I find more interesting than the shortage itself is why that specific band of experience is the one that has gone missing. Because it is not random. And once you follow the thread back, the whole thing starts to look a lot less like bad luck and a lot more like arithmetic.

Do the Maths on Who is Missing

When Engineers Australia polled a room of industry people on which engineers were hardest to recruit, 69 per cent pointed to the mid-level group, roughly eight to fourteen years of experience. Only 16 per cent said early career. Only 16 per cent said senior [1]. Consult Australia’s Confidence and Continuity survey lands in similar territory, with member firms consistently ranking staff recruitment among their most persistent challenges [2].

So work backwards from that. An engineer with fourteen years of experience today started their career around 2012. One with ten years started around 2016. One with eight started around 2018. That band of people entered the workforce in a very specific window, and that window sits directly on top of the mining downturn and the years immediately after it.

Between 2014 and 2018, enrolments in Australian mining engineering courses fell by about 63 per cent [3]. The completions data is starker still. Department of Education figures compiled by AUSMASA show mining engineering completions across all levels falling from 519 in 2014 to 80 in 2023, with the bachelor-level decline sitting at around 98 per cent [4].

Ninety-eight per cent. For an industry that underpins a meaningful share of Australia’s export economy.

That did not happen by accident. Commodity prices collapsed, and the industry did what industries do under cost pressure. Graduate programs were paused, scholarships were cut, cadetships quietly disappeared. Prospective students read the same headlines about mining job losses that everyone else did and made an entirely rational decision to study something else.

There was a policy layer sitting on top of it too. Mining Engineer, Petroleum Engineer and Metallurgist were all removed from the Skilled Occupation List effective 1 July 2016 [5]. Separately, UNSW’s engineering faculty has described how a change to post-study work visa options for international students in mining engineering that same year saw a large share of applications withdrawn nationally within about a week. That visa change was reversed roughly a year later, but by then the message had landed [6].

So at the exact moment the domestic pipeline was narrowing, the international one narrowed alongside it.

The cost of that is not paid in the year it happens. It is paid a decade later, when the people who should now be running your projects were never brought in to begin with. Which is the part I think gets skipped in most conversations about the skills shortage. This was not something that happened to the industry. In large part it is something the industry did to itself, one entirely rational cost-cutting decision at a time.

The Migration Answer is Already Not Working

The standard response to a domestic supply problem is skilled migration, and Australia leans on it hard. More than 60 per cent of the engineering workforce here is born overseas, and overseas-born engineers have accounted for the clear majority of workforce growth in recent years [7].

Here is the number that should stop people though. According to Engineers Australia’s analysis of Census data, only about 50 per cent of overseas-born qualified engineers in Australia are actually working in engineering roles. For Australian-born engineers, the figure is closer to 65 per cent [8].

Think about what that gap represents. Tens of thousands of qualified engineers already in this country, already holding visas, already here, not working as engineers. And the barriers are almost never technical capability. They are the absence of “local experience”, unfamiliarity with Australian standards and codes, no professional network to lean on, and plain employer risk aversion.

So the market is complaining loudly that it cannot find engineers while declining to hire roughly half the engineers it has already brought in. That is not a supply problem. That is a gatekeeping problem, and it is one the industry controls entirely.

The Leaky Bucket Nobody Wants to Talk About

Then there is retention, which I would argue is the least discussed part of this whole picture.

Engineers Australia’s Census-based analysis puts it at around 3,200 engineers leaving the profession for other sectors every year [9]. Not leaving their employer. Leaving engineering. On the employer side, Consult Australia’s 2024 Confidence and Continuity survey found half of member firms reporting voluntary turnover between 10 and 20 per cent, with a further 11 per cent reporting rates as high as 30 per cent [10].

The reasons matter. Pay comes up, and cost of living is doing real work there. But the factors that consistently sit at the top are lack of recognition, lack of career advancement and lack of opportunity. People do not usually leave engineering because the work stopped being interesting. They leave because they could not see where they were going.

That feeds the shortage in a way that is easy to underestimate. When companies compete for the same scarce mid-career engineers by outbidding each other, they are not adding a single engineer to the national pool. They are moving the same people around at increasing cost. Salary inflation without capacity growth. And all the while the bucket keeps leaking at the bottom, because retention is slower, harder and far less visible than winning a bidding war.

The Compounding Bit

Here is what ties it together, and it is the thing I keep coming back to.

Every year a business decides not to hire and develop early-career engineers, it is not only making a decision about this year’s headcount. It is deciding whether it will have mid-career engineers a decade from now. The 2014 to 2018 decisions produced the shortage sitting in front of us in 2026. The decisions being made this year will produce the one waiting in 2036.

And the numbers ahead do not leave much room. Engineers Australia has projected around 25,000 qualified engineers retiring from the labour force over a five-year window, roughly 5,000 a year [11]. Only 8.5 per cent of Australian graduates come out with an engineering qualification, the sixth lowest proportion in the OECD [12]. Engineers Australia is now calling for a national target of at least 60,000 additional engineering graduates over the decade ahead, which gives you a sense of the size of the hole [13].

In mining specifically, Jobs and Skills Australia data showed fill rates for Mining Engineer vacancies at just 42 per cent in 2021, the sixth lowest of any occupation in the country [14]. That figure is a few years old now, but nothing that has happened to the graduate pipeline since would suggest it has improved.

Meanwhile, the graduate end of the market is in genuinely good shape. The 2025 Graduate Outcomes Survey has engineering graduates at 90.1 per cent employed, 83.4 per cent of them in full-time work, which is second highest of any field of study. Median full-time salary sits at $82,500 within months of finishing, also second highest [15]. The talent is arriving, and it is good.

The question is whether the industry is willing to invest in the eight to ten years it takes to turn that talent into the exact person it keeps saying it cannot find.

Where That Leaves You Depends on Where You Sit

If you are hiring: waiting for the fully formed mid-career engineer is going to keep getting harder and more expensive, and not because anyone is failing to look hard enough. The maths does not support it. The businesses quietly doing well are the ones treating early-career hiring as capacity building rather than charity, and the ones willing to take a considered look at an overseas-qualified engineer who has everything except an Australian project on the CV.

If you are early in your career: the market needs you more than the job ads suggest. There is a real gap ahead of you and it is structural rather than cyclical. The first few years are rarely straightforward, but the people who push through to that mid-career mark are walking into a market that has been short of them for over a decade.

But the pattern is hard to miss. Almost every part of this shortage traces back to a decision someone made for sensible short-term reasons, roughly ten years before the consequences turned up.

Which raises a fairly uncomfortable question. If the shortage we are dealing with now was built between 2014 and 2018, what exactly are we building right now for 2036?

Jack Challinor, Technical Services Consultant