Canada brings mine training to Mongolia with the help of EduMine, UBC and MUST

The Oyu Tolgoi property in southern Mongolia contains approximately 81 billion pounds of copper and 46 million ounces of gold in Measured, Indicated and Inferred resources. This represents one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper-gold projects; the current resources are expected to support open pit and underground mining for approximately 60 years. It could also contend for the world’s largest human resources challenge.

In October 2009, Vancouver-based Ivanhoe Mines and its partner Rio Tinto signed a long-term investment agreement with the government of Mongolia for the construction and operation of Oyu Tolgoi. Among the terms is an agreement that at least 90 per cent of the employees at Oyu Tolgoi be Mongolian citizens.

To meet this goal, virtual campuses accessible through Oyu Tolgoi’s human resources department and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology’s (MUST) mining department were up and running in October. The first students have already enrolled in Canadian-developed online mining courses, designed to provide applied training and skills development to professionals in Mongolia’s rapidly growing mining industry.

The curriculum has two parts: 160 hours of online courses that will be provided by EduMine, and nine days of short courses that will be delivered by about 20 University of British Columbia (UBC) professors at MUST’s campus in Ulan Bator.

To read more, see the full article on the CIM magazine website.