How to turn a good mining resume into a great one.

Career advice

January 16, 2024

Good resumes get read. Great resumes get you interviews. So, what makes a great mining resume?

Most FIFO and mining resumes follow a similar pattern.

Some are easy to shortlist. Others never make it past a first review.

After three decades recruiting across Australia’s mining sector, our team has read thousands of resumes.

It's only right you take away a few simple ways to structure your resume so recruiters can quickly see your experience, safety background, and site capability.

Let's have a look at the basics first.

Getting the basics of your mining resume right

Here are a few quick tips on creating a winning resume:

Your front page is a selling page and needs to highlight all your qualifications, experience and skills relevant to the role, and your results (achievements).
Only include the information that adds relevant value to your application. (The last 10 to 15 years for those with significant work history. For those with less it’s acceptable to go back 10 years)
Use bolded headings to ensure key information is easy to find.

What recruiters look for in a FIFO or mining resume

Before we get into formatting, most recruiters quickly scan a mining resume for:

Your tickets and licences
Site or operational experience
Safety exposure
The machines, equipment, or trade skills / technical skills you bring

If those details are easy to find, your chances of getting an interview increase significantly.

How to Structure a Successful FIFO or Mining Resume

Most great mining resumes follow a similar structure.

What do these resumes look like and what should you include? Here’s what our expert mining industry recruiters had to say:

Contact Information

It’s obvious but contact details are sometimes missing or outdated.

Include:

Full name
Mobile number
Email address
Location (city/state)

Recruiters often work quickly. If your contact details aren’t easy to find, your resume might be skipped.

Pro tip: Double-check your phone number and email before sending your application

Career Summary / Executive Summary / Career Objective (for graduates)

The objective of this summary is to hook the reader in, to keep them reading. Keep it to three or four short sentences.

But what should those sentences say?

State your job title or profession
Include two or three key points about why you are suited to the role
Summarise your years of experience.

Pro tip: This is not where you describe your career in detail from beginning to the present day.

Education and Qualifications

You only need to include the highest level attained in the specific field of study. (Once you have professional work experience, your primary and secondary education is irrelevant.)

Pro tip: There’s no need to include certificate-level qualifications if you have a diploma in the same study area.

Achievements

Including achievements is a great opportunity to highlight your capabilities and what you offer to a company.

Pro tip: Try to quantify (as much as is possible) the tangible gains that came from your contribution to the overall achievement.

Key Skills and Attributes or Key Capabilities

This is the space to really highlight what you can offer to the role and the company. This is not the space to list all your skills, but rather it’s the space to list your key capabilities that relate to the role.

This section is often overlooked by jobseekers, yet providing a list of six to eight key skills could make all the difference in a review of applicants.

Pro tip: It’s important to ensure you can provide tangible examples of times you have used these skills, as they may come up in an interview.

Employment History

This one might seem straightforward but it’s actually the part of the resume where errors are most often made.

Crosscheck your employment dates! We regularly ask people in interviews to confirm employment dates because the years are incorrect, the jobs cross over, or there are gaps in employment history.

Pro tip: Don’t fill in gaps by extending dates a few months here and there. When a recruiter catches these (and we usually do) it creates a very bad impression. If you are not a detailed kind of person, get someone else to do this for you.

Safety Experience (Important for FIFO & Mining Jobs)

Looking for tips on highlighting safety experience in a mining resume? Safety experience is one of the most important sections.

Employers want to quickly understand your familiarity with site safety systems.

You may want to highlight:

Toolbox meetings
Take 5 or risk assessments
Incident reporting
Permit systems
Isolation procedures
Safety leadership or mentoring

Even entry-level candidates can include safety exposure from training or previous workplaces.

Tickets, Licences and Qualifications

Mining recruiters often scan resumes specifically for mining tickets and licences.

List them clearly in one section.

Examples:

HR Driver’s Licence
Working at Heights
Confined Space
Forklift Licence
Trade Certificate
Relevant machinery tickets

If a role requires certain certifications, this section helps recruiters confirm eligibility quickly.

Mining Resumes With No Experience

Many people try to enter mining from other industries.

If that’s you, focus on transferable experience.

Examples include:

Working in safety-focused environments
Shift work or long rosters
Heavy machinery operation
Mechanical or trade skills
Working outdoors or in remote environments

These experiences often translate well to FIFO work.

Simple Free FIFO & Mining Resume Templates

If you’re unsure how to structure your resume, these basic mining resume templates work well for many FIFO and mining roles.

1. SEEK: Mining Resume Templates

2. Dawn: Miner Resume Template (Australia) and Mining Engineer Resume Template (Australia)

The first impression matters

It is important to remember that your resume is often the first impression a company or recruiter has of you as an applicant, so spend some time on your resume to ensure you create a good first impression.

Pro tip: Make sure you know the content of your resume and can comment on each of the sections within it, and the various jobs you’ve had.

Writing a resume is a task worth taking the time to do well. It can be the key to unlocking a great future and securing a fantastic mining industry job.

No matter what your mining skill set, MPI will have the ideal job for you. Register with us here. We have been mining industry recruitment specialists for over 30 years.

by Dan Hatch