Below the Surface

Executive summary

For years, mining’s talent shortage was a frontline and technical-skills problem: too few engineers, an ageing site workforce, fewer graduates each year. That has changed. The shortage has climbed the organisation and now reaches the C-suite and the board. You can see it in how boards behave when a chief executive leaves: more and more reach sideways to a non-executive director, or back to someone who has already run the company, rather than promote from within, and often the person stepping in is past normal retirement age. The appointments matter less than the pattern: the industry is short of leaders exactly as the critical role of a leader is evolving from running and operating mines to discovering and building them.

Rising Demand, Shrinking Bench

Two curves are crossing. Demand for the metals behind electrification and defence is climbing fast: the International Energy Agency expects demand for transition minerals to at least double by 2040, and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence counts 384 or more new mines needed by 2035. Building them takes people who have built and run mines before, and that group is shrinking faster than it is being replaced.

From the Coalface to the Boardroom

None of this is news. More than half the US mining workforce, some 221,000 people, retires by 2029; engineering graduates are down close to 40% since 2016; and only 4% of young people would definitely work in the industry. The point is not that the shortage exists, but where it has reached. The same thinning of experience now runs all the way to the board, where losing the person in the corner office is not just another vacancy to fill.

When the Boardroom Becomes the Bench

The clearest evidence is not in the surveys but in what boards do. Across the wider economy, when a leadership gap opens unexpectedly, more and more boards fill it by calling someone back: a former chief executive returning to a company he used to run, or a director stepping out of the oversight seat and into the operating one. The figures track it: in 2025, nineteen incoming chief executives across the S&P 1500 were appointed directly from the company’s own board, the highest number since 2020, a pattern the researchers themselves read as a sign of thin succession pipelines. Reaching backwards usually says more about the board’s preparation than about the returning leader; it signals a bench that was never built.

This is not a relic of the pandemic years, and it is not confined to any one sector; it has continued and, if anything, grown more common. When Boeing needed steadying through the 737 MAX crisis, it turned to its own chairman, a director since 2009, to take the chief executive’s job. Intel did much the same more recently, reaching for a former board member to lead the company as it fought to regain lost ground. In each case the steadiest pair of hands the board could find was one of its own directors, not anyone in the layer below the chief executive.

Mining is no exception. Take two mid-cap producers, both of which appointed a new chief executive since 2024 by reaching into their own boardroom rather than promoting from management or running a clean external search.

Vignette one: the semi-planned reach into the boardroom. At an exchange-listed minerals producer, the incoming chief executive had run two other mining companies and had joined this one’s board as a non-executive director two years earlier. When the sitting CEO left, the board passed over its management team and promoted one of its own directors. The handover was orderly. But the most credible operator the board could name was sitting at its own table, not in the ranks below the CEO.

Vignette two: the emergency un-retirement. At another producer, the chief executive was removed without warning over a conduct matter. The same day, the board asked its deputy chair, a man with nearly fifty years in the industry and prior spells running major companies, to take the wheel. He was in his late sixties and, by his own account, heading for retirement. He stepped in because the board needed a safe pair of hands at once and had nobody inside ready, and he has since had to give up other directorships to do it.

Neither case reflects badly on the individual; in a crisis, an experienced hand is exactly what a board wants within reach. The pattern is the point. In both companies the bench was too shallow to produce a ready successor, so the board fell back on the most experienced people it had: its own directors. A company can do that once. It cannot build a decade of growth on it.

Mining’s Depletion Curve

Plenty of sectors have an ageing leadership cohort. Mining’s problem is that three pressures land at once: a workforce ageing faster than almost any other industry, a shrinking education pipeline, and demand rising precisely because of the energy transition. Projects are being fast-tracked, but the people to staff them are not there. Chile alone is reckoned to need more than 34,000 extra workers by 2032; Canada faces a shortfall of between 80,000 and 120,000 by 2030.

What boards want has changed too, which narrows the field again. The command-and-control site boss who was once the obvious CEO no longer fits. A modern operation needs someone who can earn an experienced crew’s respect on technical merit, hold a complex high-risk business together, and lead a younger, more diverse workforce. People like that are rare, take years to develop, and cannot be conjured from a shallow bench.

The Shortage Feeds Itself

The cost of leaning on returning and director-level leaders rarely shows up at once; it is deferred. A board-drawn chief executive buys speed and stability, but is usually a stop-gap, brought in to steady the business and set up a cleaner handover next time. If that next time arrives with the bench still empty, the company runs the same drill again, from an even older starting point. And every senior hire drawn from the same shallow pool thins it further for the next company that needs one. The deeper risk is strategic: a leader from an earlier era reaches for an old playbook, and the habit of recalling familiar names stalls the renewal the business needs to attract a new generation.

It bites hardest at mid-cap producers: a major has the management depth to absorb a sudden departure, a mid-cap rarely does, and it ends up chasing the same small circle of veterans as everyone else.

Implications and recommended actions

The response is to treat leadership depth the way boards already treat ore reserves or safety: something to be measured, maintained and reported on. In practice:

• Treat succession as a standing reserve. Keep a live, ranked view of who could step up now, who could in a year or two, and who is longer-term. That tiered approach is what governance advisers now press for.
• Develop the layer below the chief executive with purpose. Boards reach into their own ranks because the tier beneath the CEO was never built into credible candidates. Give your best operators real profit-and-loss responsibility, time in front of the board, and sight of the decisions a CEO actually makes.
• Know the outside market before you need it. Work out who the credible external candidates are, and what it would take to land them, long before a transition. In a sector this short of leaders, you cannot build a shortlist in the fortnight after a resignation.
• Look beyond your own borders. With every market short of proven leaders, a one-country search cuts the field down just when it is thinnest. “They will not understand our business” no longer holds up: the demands of running a modern operation carry across borders, and the rarest qualities, sound judgement and the ability to influence, are not tied to any one country. Test what a candidate would actually have to learn, rather than ruling out an unfamiliar background out of habit.
• Use board-level and returning appointments with an end in mind. When a board does draw on a seasoned director or former chief, the brief should be explicit: stabilise the business and repair the succession, with a plan for the next permanent leader. It is a bridge, not a substitute for fixing the pipeline.
• Make leadership depth part of the investment story. As demand and scrutiny grow, how deep and renewable a producer’s leadership is becomes a real factor in whether it can deliver its plans. That belongs in conversations with investors, not just the boardroom.

Summary

A respected veteran stepping back in to steady the ship is reassuring, and often the right call in the moment. But repeated across enough companies, it stops looking like strength and starts looking like an industry that has not renewed its own leadership. Mining is being asked to take on one of the era-defining supply tasks of the energy transition. The companies that come through it will be those that treat leadership depth as something to build over years, starting now, while the senior people who can do the building are still in post.

If you would like a copy of this article or are interested in a discussion, please email paul@templetonglobalsearch.com.