Women are now actively present in male-dominated professions like mining engineering where some forty-five percent of practicing mining engineers over the past ten years are females.
Rufino Bomasang, a member of the board of Directors of the Philippine Mine Safety and Environment Association (PMSEA) and a member of the Board of Mining Engineering of the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), said that women are now starting to invade the male-dominated mining engineering profession because they can actually do the job the same way as men do thus there is no longer a distinction between males and females in the said profession.
He shared there had been 20 to 30 graduates who passed the mining engineering licensure examination but over the past ten years but this number grew to 150 to 250 that contributed in stabilizing the availability of mining professionals needed by the robust industry.
The PMSEA official claimed that the majority of the mining professionals still opt to stay in the country and join different mining companies while others are lured to work overseas primarily because of the attractive compensation package being offered by multinational companies operating in various parts of the world.
Bomasang encouraged the youth to take up mining-related courses if they want to be gainfully employed and get hefty pay checks because mining remains robust with the ongoing energy transition from the use of fossil fuel to renewable energy, such as solar and wind.
For her part, PMSEA Board of Director Angelita Lee, who is also serving as the president of the Eastern Rizal Miners Association, admitted having difficulty in hiring mining engineers for her company’s quarry operations in the past because of the limited number of mining professionals.
However, she stipulated that just recently when her company opened the hiring of mining engineers, there were numerous applicants that only shows there are already many individuals who graduated from mining-related courses that are looking for jobs, especially in her area in Rizal.
Lee said that the availability of mining professionals will definitely help in aggressively giving life to the country’s mining industry to contribute in spurring the growth of the economy that had been heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mining companies are also contributing in convincing the youth from mining communities to take up mining-related courses, like mining engineering and geology, by providing attractive scholarship grants in exchange for their being hired for jobs once they graduate from their courses just to ensure there are available mining professionals to takeover those who will be retiring from their services with the said companies.
One of the mining firms that is offering scholarship programs for interested residents from its host and neighboring communities is Philex Mining Corporation that is regularly conducting a fundraising event via Gold for a Cause to generate resources to sustain its scholarship program for beneficiaries wanting to take up mining-related courses.