Project: Roadmap for skills supply for the mining and steel industry

The mining and steel industry faces major challenges with the supply of skills. Svemin has therefore, together with Jernkontoret and Industriarbetsgivarna, produced a roadmap to map the needs of the future.

In line with more advanced production and increased service delivery, the need for employees with more qualified training increases, partly because employees develop their skills throughout their professional careers. This, in turn, has increased competition for the qualified professionals, technicians, college engineers and civil engineers. At the same time, the search pressure for the upper secondary school’s vocational program and technical education has been falling for a long time and is far too low to meet the future recruitment needs. It has also been trained for few engineers. According to Statistics Sweden’s (SCB) latest trend forecast, it is evident that in relation to other civil engineering programs, there will be the greatest shortage for civil engineers in chemical, bio, material and geotechnical engineering until 2035.

Outdated image of the industry

In addition to these challenges, the mining, metal extraction and steel industries are struggling to recruit young people, especially women, as there is still an outdated picture of what work in the mining, metal extraction and steel industry means. In addition, urbanization is a major problem for the industry, since almost all the active mines and facilities in the industry are located in sparsely populated areas or at distances from major cities and educational institutions.

In order for the industry to be able to maintain its competitiveness in the future and to know what measures need to be taken, a comprehensive document is needed that gives an overview of the area. Only when the industry’s overall competence and recruitment needs are identified and addressed against access and other conditions can the biggest challenges, as well as the solutions needed, be identified.

Roadmap for skill supply for the mining and steel industry was developed by Jernkontoret, Industriarbetsgiarna and Svemin and was completed in May 2019. Vinnova, the Swedish Energy Agency and Formas are responsible for financing the project through the strategic innovation program STRIM – a joint venture to strengthen the Swedish mining and metal mining industry. It is available in Swedish.


The project is carried out within the framework of the Strategic Innovation Program (SIP) Swedish Mining Innovation, a joint venture by VinnovaFormas and the Swedish Energy Agency.