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| Coal miner: As coal mining evolves past heavy labor and pickaxes, more recent college graduates, like Joshua Hoffman, are
drawn to it as a smart career choice. Courtesy of Joshua Hoffman |
College graduates heading to careers in ... the coal mines
With many miners approaching retirement, the industry is trying to attract young talent.
By Tom A. Peter | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 31, 2007 edition
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Morgantown, W.Va. - When Joshua Hoffman's parents, a computer scientist and law-enforcement officer, sent their son to the University of Missouri at Rolla (UMR), a coal mine was probably the last place they imagined higher education taking their son.
Yet, as an explosives engineering major, Mr. Hoffman is now excited to don a hard hat and pursue the black rock. His parents, however, are less than enthused.
"My dad was, like, isn't [coal mining] horrible?" recounts Hoffman. It took some convincing, but he managed to persuade his parents that mining has evolved past pickaxes and black lung and is increasingly a smart career for well-educated individuals.
For decades, coal mining was a risky career path, less because of the physical dangers and more so because of fleeting job security. While college students previously avoided mining as a course of study, now, thanks to the coal boom and the industry's growing need for college-educated engineers, mining has become a career that more young people are going to college to pursue, rather than to escape.
"Throughout the '80s and the biggest part of the '90s, we steered our youth away from mining because we were in a period of austerity," says Chris Hamilton, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association. Now, many West Virginians are no longer discouraging their children from a career in the mining sector.
Though Adam Patterson's family has mined coal in the mountain state for seven generations, when he started school at West Virginia University (WVU) he was uncertain if he'd continue in their footsteps. "But when I got here and saw the opportunities that were available, it became apparent that it was something I really wanted to do," says Mr. Patterson, now a junior majoring in mining engineering.
The number of mining jobs in West Virginia, the second-largest coal producer in the United States, jumped 38 percent between 2003 and 2006. And because of looming retirements, demand for new workers looks strong for years to come.
After bouncing between civil, industrial, and mechanical engineering, Robin Oldham, a senior at WVU settled on mining engineering. "Money was the big factor," he says. "I knew I was guaranteed a job." Like many other university mining programs, WVU's boasts a 100 percent job placement rating.
Aside from forcing a number of miners into new careers, the staffing slump during the '80s and '90s created a problem just now coming to fruition. Amid the layoffs of the past two decades, few new miners entered the field. Now, Christopher Bise, chairman of WVU's department of mining and engineering, says the average miner is in his early to mid-50s, approaching retirement. In the next decade, he estimates that 50 to 60 percent of the mining workforce will retire, and soon the supply of qualified miners will only meet about one-third the demand for labor.
"Once [students] get into the field, they might end up holding down jobs at age 30 that heretofore they might not have even been considered for until they were 40," says Dr. Bise.
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