Forget Plastics: There’s Gold in Mining Careers

Are you still encouraging your kids to be engineers so they can go to Silicon Valley, get stock options and be rich?

Maybe there is another area they should be looking at instead of tech. How about chemical engineering for the oil companies?

I’ve heard that the oil companies are hiring right out of college with starting salaries of $65,000 plus bonuses.

Not too shabby.

But there’s an area that’s even more lucrative.

Geology.

With the mining sector down on its luck for decades, geology was the last thing that an ambitious young person would want to study. But now that metal prices are soaring and the mining companies expanding, there are suddenly thousands of job openings but not enough people to fill them.

Lots of demand and little supply means high salaries.

Geologists right out of college are now earning, in some cases, more than MBAs.

From Bloomberg:

But since 2004, salaries for geology undergraduates in Canada, home to three of the world’s largest gold producers, have jumped about 50 percent to an average of $91,654 U.S., according to Norman Duke, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, who has been a consultant for companies including Teck Cominco Ltd.

Geologists’ pay tops the average for new U.S. M.B.A.s, which, according to an August 2007 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, was $86,696. Those with mining skills are also catching up with Harvard University M.B.A.s, whose average starting salary rose 15 percent over three years to $115,000 in 2007, according to the university.

This year there will be about 1,200 geology grads in Canada to fill 9,000 positions in the country’s mining industry, said Ryan Montpellier, executive director of the government’s Mining Industry Resources Council.

In the United States, the number of jobs open to geologists will rise 22 percent in the decade ending in 2016, about double the average for all occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Forget hedge funds or law school.

Geology is where it’s at.

“There is a chronic shortage of skilled people, and wages have skyrocketed,” said Bart Melek, commodity strategist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “There’s no relief in sight.”

But is anyone talking about geology? Of course not. It doesn’t seem glamorous.

Maybe perceptions are about to change.

Geology: the new plastics.