Sixty places, four rotations, and everybody spends time on shift.

What the programme is

Two years, four six-month rotations, across at least two operations and two disciplines. Sixty places a year. You are paid a full graduate salary from day one, not a stipend, and you are given real work with real consequences rather than a project that gets filed when you leave.

At least 75% of places are reserved for nationals of the group’s host countries: Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, South Africa, Gabon, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Namibia. The remaining places are open to graduates of any nationality. This is not a diversity statement, it is the mechanism by which the group meets a 90% national workforce commitment in countries where the technical skill base is thin.

The programme has run since 2011. Four hundred and eighty people have completed it, 71% are still with the group, and eleven are now in roles reporting directly to a general manager or an executive committee member.

The rotations

Rotation one is always at an operating mine and always includes a period on shift. Everybody, regardless of discipline, spends time on a production crew. A finance graduate who has never watched a shift change does not understand why the month-end numbers look the way they do, and a metallurgist who has never worked nights does not understand why the plant behaves differently at 4am.

Rotations two and three are within your discipline at two different operations, chosen so that you see contrasting orebodies, flowsheets or operating contexts — an underground copper mine and an open pit bauxite operation, or a hydrometallurgical circuit and a flotation plant.

Rotation four is negotiated. It can be a deepening rotation in the area you intend to work in, a corporate rotation in London or Johannesburg, or a project rotation on a study or a build. Roughly a third of graduates choose a rotation outside their original discipline entirely, and the group encourages it.

Disciplines and places

What we ask for

The bar is deliberately narrow. We are not screening for polish.

• A completed degree in a relevant discipline, awarded within the three years before the programme starts.
• A demonstrated ability to think through a problem you have not seen before. The assessment centre is built around this and nothing else.
• Willingness to live at or near a mine site, including in remote locations, for at least the first year.
• Working French for rotations at Lubumba, Nyanga or Bagoé. If you do not have it and want those rotations, we fund the training.
• The right to work in at least one of our host countries, or eligibility for a work permit there.

What we do not ask for

Several conventional graduate recruitment filters are deliberately absent, because they select for background rather than capability.

• A specific class of degree. We do not filter on grade classification. Several of our strongest graduates would have been screened out by a 2:1 filter.
• A named university. We recruit from 40 institutions across nine countries and do not maintain a target list.
• Prior industry experience or internships. Access to a mining internship is largely a function of who your family knows, which is precisely what we are trying not to select for.
• An application fee. There is never a fee, at any stage, for anything.

How selection works

Applications open in August and close on 31 October. There are three stages.

Stage one: application. A form, your degree transcript and two short written answers. Written answers are assessed against a rubric by two assessors independently, with names and universities removed.

Stage two: technical interview. Forty-five minutes with two people from the discipline you have applied to. You will be given a problem you have not seen and asked to work through it aloud. We are assessing how you think, not whether you arrive at the answer, and the interviewers are explicitly instructed to say so at the start.

Stage three: assessment centre. One day, held in each host country rather than requiring travel to a single location. A group exercise, an individual case, and a conversation with a general manager. Offers are made within ten working days of the last assessment centre.

Everyone who reaches stage two receives written feedback whether or not they are offered a place. This costs the group a meaningful amount of time and is worth it, because a graduate who was rejected fairly and told why will apply again in two years, and several of our current employees did.