3 Things to Put on Your Mining Resume

The mining world is textured and gritty, blankets of dust cover trucks and fierce tyre treads tear up the hard, red earth, revealing a fertile slew of soil below. Australian employment figures are on an ever swinging pendulum, obscuring the reality of many industries and troubles of people just like you. Mining careers though, have ducked the sweeping decline set in motion by the fall of the Lehman brothers, consistently growing in both appeal and opportunity. If you’re considering a career in the mines or a mineral sea-change, take these tips and stand out from the pack – thousands of jobs attract countless applicants with skills identical or in excess of your own – get the edge you know you deserve and transform a long shot into a life-time success.

Appealing to Your Audience

When most people write CV’s, they qualify what they’re looking for, opposed to what they can offer an interested company. Writing with purpose will allow you to target HR professionals, employers or third parties like Randstad recruitment agencies, and use your CV as an introductory dialogue into the wonderful world of you. Be concise, think about what they’re looking for and go over the criteria, matching your current skill-sets and experience with the listed qualities or requirements. Don’t include everything you’ve ever done, only detail positions or internships relevant to the advertisement and don’t prattle on with irrelevant figures. Packing your complete and unabridged professional biography into one document will look desperate for anything, not eager to break into mining. Score the interview by communicating you WANT to be there.

Let Your Experience Speak For Itself

Adjectives and superlatives are a positive exercise, but they will not convince a discerning employer to pick up your CV over all others. Why? Well, emotional keywords are subjective – you may perceive yourself to be creative, innovative and hardworking, but it’s always better to exhibit these very desirable traits through experience, than a convoluted list of back-patting qualities. Be confident – if you possess the drive and determination, it will translate through what you’ve done and who you are, not what you tell others you think you should be to please them.

Be Word Perfect

Grammar, syntax and punctuation are rare after-thoughts once most people file out of the front gate on the last day of school – Nobody really cares about that stuff, right? Wrong. A single mistake could mean the difference to a friendly call, touching base and establishing those first exciting ties, or your CV taking a nose-dive into the shredder or Rubbish box of an email server. You don’t want to be rubbished. Attention to detail is often listed as an important quality across a variety of occupations, including mining; a few clumsy mistakes on a single piece of paper will speak volumes, allowing people you’ll never meet to form an opinion about your critical observation skills. Don’t let this happen to you. Proof once, proof twice, proof thrice and let someone else look over it, before you send it away.

What mistakes have you made in past applications? Does the interview process excite you, scare you, bewilder you, even? Let us know in the comments section below.

Jessica Hannah