Executive summary
When a mining company loses its chief executive now, the telling thing is not who leaves but who the board turns to next. More and more often it does not promote from within. It brings back someone who ran the company years ago, or it moves one of its own non-executive directors into the operating seat, and often that person was already on the way to retirement. Each appointment makes sense on the day it is made. The worry is how many boards are now making the same one.
At the level of engineers and geologists, mining's talent shortage is old news. What is newer, and less discussed, is that the same thinning has reached the top of the company. The people who can run a mining business, and not simply a mine, are now about as scarce as the people who can find one. Boards are telling us so through their appointments, and they are doing it just as the job itself changes from operating mines to discovering and building them.
Demand is rising as the bench thins
Demand for the metals behind electrification and defence is climbing fast. The International Energy Agency expects the world to need at least twice as much of the main transition minerals by 2040; Benchmark Mineral Intelligence puts the number of new mines required by 2035 at 384 or more. Building those mines takes people who have built and run one before, and that group is getting smaller, not larger.
The raw figures are familiar. More than half the US mining workforce, around 221,000 people, will have retired by 2029. Engineering graduates are down by close to 40 per cent since 2016. Only 4 per cent of young people say they would definitely work in the industry. What has changed is how far up the shortage now reaches. Losing the person in the corner office is no longer an ordinary vacancy, and increasingly there is no obvious candidate inside to fill it.
Boards are hiring chief executives from their own boardrooms
The clearest sign is in what boards do when a chief executive leaves without much warning. Across business generally, more of them now fill the gap by looking backwards: a former chief executive returning to a company he once ran, or a director stepping out of the boardroom and into the executive suite. In 2025, nineteen incoming chief executives across the S&P 1500 came straight off their own boards, the most since 2020. The researchers who counted them read it as we do, as a sign the succession pipeline was never built. Bringing back a familiar name usually says more about how ready the board was than about the person returning.
This is not a hangover from the pandemic, and it is not confined to mining. When Boeing needed steadying through the 737 MAX crisis, it gave the chief executive's job to its own chairman, a director since 2009. Intel recently did much the same, turning to a former board member to lead its recovery. In each case the safest pair of hands the board could find was already sitting at its own table, not in the layer below the chief executive.
Mining is no different. Two mid-cap producers have appointed chief executives from their own boardrooms since 2024. In the first, the incoming chief executive had run two other mining companies and had joined this one's board two years earlier. When the sitting chief executive left, the board passed over its management team and moved one of its own directors into the job. The handover was smooth. But the most credible operator the board could name was one of its own non-executives, not anyone it had grown inside the company.
The second was not planned at all. A chief executive was removed overnight over a conduct matter, and by the end of the same day the board had asked its deputy chairman to step in: a man with nearly fifty years in the industry, who had run major companies before and was, on his own account, heading for retirement. He took the job because someone had to be in the seat that day and there was no one ready inside. He has since given up other board roles to do it.
There is nothing wrong with either decision. In a crisis you want an experienced hand within reach, and both boards had one. The problem is what the decision reveals. In both companies the board reached for its own directors because it had no ready successor of its own. A company can do that once. It is a poor way to run ten years of growth.
Retirement is running ahead of development
Plenty of industries have an ageing set of leaders. Mining's difficulty is that three things are happening at once: its workforce is ageing faster than almost any other sector's, its education pipeline is shrinking, and demand is rising because of the energy transition. Projects are being pushed forward faster than the people to staff them can be found. Chile alone is reckoned to need more than 34,000 extra workers by 2032; Canada faces a gap of somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 by 2030.
What boards are looking for has narrowed the field further. The old command-and-control site boss, who used to be the obvious next chief executive, no longer fits. A modern operation needs someone who can win the respect of an experienced crew on merit, hold a large and hazardous business together, and lead a younger and more mixed workforce at the same time. People who can do all three are rare, and they take years to grow. You cannot hire one at short notice.
The shortage feeds itself
The cost of leaning on returning and board-level leaders does not show up straight away. A chief executive drawn from the board buys a company speed and calm, but usually as a stop-gap: someone to steady things and set up a cleaner handover next time. If next time comes and there is still no one ready inside, the company does the same thing again, from an older starting point. Every senior leader pulled out of the same small pool also leaves it shallower.
The strategic risk is quieter and worse. A leader formed in an earlier era tends to reach for an earlier era's playbook, and a board that keeps recalling familiar names puts off the renewal it needs to attract the next generation. This bites hardest on mid-cap producers. A major has the depth to absorb a sudden departure; a mid-cap rarely does, and it ends up chasing the same short list of veterans as everyone else.
What boards can do
- Keep a live list of successors, and look at it often. Know who could step up now, who could in a year or two, and who is further off. Review it with the same seriousness as any other risk the board carries, not in the fortnight after a resignation.
- Build the layer below the chief executive on purpose. Boards reach into their own ranks because the tier under the chief executive was never turned into credible candidates. Give your best operators real profit-and-loss ownership and a clear view of the decisions a chief executive actually makes.
- Know the outside market before you need it. Work out who the credible external candidates are, and what it would take to attract them, well before a transition. In an industry this short of leaders, a shortlist cannot be built in a fortnight.
- Search wider than your own country. When every market is short of proven leaders, insisting on a home-grown one narrows the field at the worst possible moment. "They won't understand our business" no longer holds: the demands of running a modern operation travel, and the two rarest qualities, judgement and the ability to influence, belong to no single country. Ask what a candidate would genuinely have to learn before ruling out an unfamiliar background out of habit.
- If you do bring back a director or a former chief, be clear why. Set the brief plainly: steady the business and rebuild the succession, with a named plan for the next permanent leader. It is a bridge, and the pipeline behind it still has to be built.
- Make leadership depth part of the investment case. As demand and scrutiny grow, how deep and how renewable a producer's leadership is becomes a real question about whether it can deliver. It belongs in the conversation with investors as much as in the boardroom.
In short
A respected veteran stepping back in is reassuring, and it is often the right call in the moment. Do it across enough companies, though, and it stops being reassurance and starts being evidence that the industry has not grown its own leaders. Mining has been handed one of the defining supply tasks of the energy transition. The companies that deliver it will be the ones that treat leadership depth as something built over years, and that starts now, while the people who can do the building are still in post.
Related: leadership-continuity and board succession are the core of our mining executive search practice.