MGE Partners with Mining Tech Firms to Boost Industry Knowledge

MGE is now working with two mining technology firms to offer specialized courses for industry workers. The Mining 360 Executive Program, MGE's partnership with Caterpillar to help industry employees learn more about the mining industry, just graduated its fourth cohort of students. Now, Hexagon’s Mining Division is now also working with MGE to offer a similar mining professional development program for its employees.

“Mining 360 explained some of the things I took for granted in the mining industry,” said Caterpillar employee Roberto Olivera, a member of the 2018 Mining 360 cohort. "In my current position, I have the opportunity to provide advice on those solutions to real problems of mining.”

After seeing what Caterpillar and the University of Arizona developed, Hexagon wanted something similar for its workers, said MGE professor John Kemeny. 

“In talking with Hexagon mining President Nick Hare, the idea was that every new employee of Hexagon would take some kind of a course to learn about mining,” Kemeny said. “It was the same kind of vision as Caterpillar to have all kinds of people working at a company like Hexagon have this depth of knowledge.”

The result is Mining 4.E, a word play on using e-learning to teach about the influence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the industry. Online course modules will launch this academic year for as many as 60 Hexagon employees who don’t have or don’t want to earn a mining engineering degree.

Students will work through the mining professional development program on their own using video lectures, virtual field trips and recorded interviews with industry professionals. It will cover the steps in mining, including ore deposits, economics, planning, design, operations and safety. Additionally, students will get a taste of Hexagon’s use of big-data analytics, sensors, the Internet of Things, 3D simulation, artificial intelligence and machine learning.