It's a crisis, albeit a slow-moving one and solving it will require rapid and concerted action.

As a senior leader in the extractive industry for more than 30 years, I've watched with growing concern as we've approached this capability cliff. Simply put, there is a wave of experienced mining engineers, metallurgists, geologists and other associated professionals approaching retirement. And with all this capability leaving the workforce it's unclear who will take their places, with significantly fewer and fewer young people opting for a career in mining.

The numbers are startling. EY, the accounting and consulting firm, calls the growing skills shortage "profound" and sees the emptying of the talent pipeline as a top risk facing the industry. Deloitte estimates that roughly half of the skilled mining engineers will retire inside of 10 years, while we're seeing barely a dribble of new entrants to university-level mining courses in key markets.

The storied Camborne School of Mines "paused" its intake of new students in 2020, while the number of graduates from universities in Canada and the US continues to dwindle. According to Bloomberg, the Colorado School of Mines, a bellwether for the industry's talent pipeline, saw total enrolment in undergraduate mining-associated courses drop by more than one-third between 2016 and 2020. Small wonder, given so few youngsters have any desire to make their living by mining.

A recent study by McKinsey shows that barely 11% of young people surveyed - that's 11% - would definitely or probably consider a career in mining. This compares with 35% for healthcare or tech. Even the oil and gas industry fares better at 14%.

Further, rapidly rising salaries are not fixing the problem. The average salary in 2023 for college graduates in the US is US$55,260, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey. You need to dig a little deeper for comparatives in mining, as it's presumably too ‘fringe' to make any NACE list, but career site owlguru.com has starting salaries for mining and geological engineers as high as $71,990 a year. And that, from my experience, is probably lowballing it given how so many of the very large, mining companies are throwing money at the problem to compete for the very scarce skills. Where the shortages are more acute, large retention and sign-on bonuses are becoming the norm.

Consider this - in Australia alone, the mining sector has more jobs to fill than at any time in its recorded history. It's an eyewatering statistic when you consider new hires often command five-figure sign-on incentives. In the US, the industry has 36,000 jobs to fill, up from 27,000 a year ago, according to EY. You can match that to the sobering fact, courtesy of McKinsey, that Australia - a global centre of mining -- has seen enrolments for undergraduate mining degrees drop by almost two-thirds since 2014. In the US, college registrations for mining courses are 39% lower since 2016 and the trendlines all seem to point downward.

This emptying of the skills pipeline would be less of a problem were the world not gearing up for its biggest-ever push for new metals used in batteries, electric cars and green-energy generation and transmission systems. My company, AngloGold Ashanti, has embarked on a massive decarbonisation push, with a $1.1 billion program to cut emissions by almost a third by the turn of the decade. So has almost any other company with an ambition to attract investment capital.

Wood Mackenzie, which tracks metal supply and demand, estimates a tenfold increase in demand for cobalt by 2030, a 16 times jump in nickel and a 60% jump in copper use. Never mind the lithium, platinum, gold, rare earths and a host of other minerals that go into almost anything with a power switch. This coincides with what EY calls a "mass retirement or resignation of workers", which has left miners scrambling to find replacements, experienced or otherwise.

It's not hard to see why college mining courses are suffering. In this new age of total transparency, fast news and heightened social and environmental consciousness, mining gets a lot of bad press -- some of it justified, much of it not. The industry has its share of easy targets for bad-news mongering, whether for tailings dam failures, sexual harassment on mine sites, headline-grabbing corruption cases or deaths in the workplace.

And us miners, not being arm-wavers, have done little to challenge the narrative by pointing out the enormous strides made to address difficult legacies, and in creating business models that are more sustainable, more progressive, more inclusive and simply more impactful and interesting than almost any other field an ambitious young person could enter.

Take an example from my company, AngloGold Ashanti, an organisation you'd not necessarily associate with a public health breakthrough. Twenty years ago, faced with mass illness and absenteeism due to the very high incidence of malaria at its newly acquired Obuasi Gold Mine in Ghana, the company did what mining companies so often do, and tackled the problem carefully and systematically. After counting every household and tens of thousands of dwellings and structures, taking census of every person across a vast city and mapping every possible vector for transmission, its engineers and medical teams devised, funded and executed a breathtakingly ambitious plan to eradicate the disease from its mines and surrounding communities. Today, malaria rates in the region have dropped more than 90%, infant mortality is a fraction of what it was and school absenteeism has plummeted. So successful is the program that it was recognised by the Ghanian government, receives private funding from the Global Fund and covers more than 1.3 million people across 16 districts. Our vice president for health, Dr Bafedile Chauke, a medical doctor specialising in public health and occupational medicine, says she's focused not only on employee health, but also "doing good to enhance the wellbeing of people in our work environments and communities". She's achieved her ambition over and again.

Even a cursory look at the websites of members of the International Council of Metals & Minerals shows stories of this kind repeated over and again, showing clever people working hard - and succeeding -- to solve engineering challenges and address society's needs. I'm an analytical chemist by training who now leads a global human resources team, working to attract and retain some of the best and most inspiring people to work in our mine sites, plants and offices across four continents and nine countries. On any given day I work with social scientists, economists, engineers and geoscientists. Even the odd accountant or two.

There are few industries that can match mining for sheer variety. The sector lies at the intersection of politics, economics, finance, engineering, infrastructure, social investment, energy planning, climate and environmental science, communication, public health and welfare, skills development and so many more. A career in mining presents the opportunity to leave a long-lasting and positive legacy - not only on people around the mine, but in societies half a world away. It presents the opportunity to work with people of different cultures in an endless collaboration, to tackle sometimes issues of mind-boggling complexity and to test your talents in truly innovative problem-solving. And aside from competitive remuneration, there is almost endless scope for personal and professional growth, particularly given the relative lack of competition in many areas.

As an industry, we must work urgently to better understand our own value proposition and to articulate it as clearly and consistently as possible, if we are to have any hope of solving the world's most pressing problems, including the existential need to reach net zero emissions by 2050. We must succeed in drawing more ambitious, driven and diverse pool of people to our industry and we must do it soon. Anything less will have enormous repercussions for our planet.

*Lisa Ali, a chemist by training, has over 30 years' experience in the global extractive industry. Since 2022, she has served as Chief People Officer of Denver-based AngloGold Ashanti, the world's fourth-largest gold mining company and the largest producer of gold in Africa. Ms Ali was previously Chief People and Sustainability Officer at Australia's Newcrest Mining, Head of Transformation at Trinidad Petroleum Holdings and has also held several senior leadership positions at BP International PLC.