John Davidson started his career with a battered old contact book from Rio Tinto after the closure of the Bougainville Copper mine in Papua New Guinea.

It was 199O and Davidson had spent nearly 20 years working with Rio mainly at Bougainville where he held a variety of positions from supply officer through to training co-ordinator and later, recruitment manager.

The sudden closure of the mine was a shock for him and hundreds of other employees. "We were sitting around licking our wounds in the Rio office in Brisbane," he recalls. "Most of the staff were either in Brisbane hoping to go back or looking to be placed outside the group."

Rio asked Davidson to stand by until the green light came through for the reopening of the mine but, as he puts it: "I had two teenagers so it was not an option to simply go into a holding pattern.

"They said perhaps you could use the resources here and place a few people and if you can make a quid out of it, then so be it," he says.

Davidson did. He jumped on a plane to Zambia and started writing a business plan immediately. One of the largest mining recruitment firms in the country, John Davidson & Associates, was quickly formed. Within nine months he had three major contracts and with his fourth job he hit pay dirt. Davidson was contracted by Chevron to join the team building the Kutubu gas pipeline in PNG.

It was arguably one of the toughest jobs he had been involved in, battling leeches, mosquitoes and constant safety issues but it set him on a course to focus on recruiting staff for the runaway mining industry.

"I was in-house and we put 450 people to work on the pipeline for many months and the project came in under budget and within time, which was not bad considering it was constructed through some of the most inhospitable places on earth," he says.

Kutubu was a turning point for Davidson. He was suddenly in charge of turning former 150 tonne truck drivers at Bougainville into drill operators on one of the toughest pipeline routes in the world.

One thing led to another and Davidson soon found himself working on the construction of the Lihir gold mine in PNG and the recruitment wheel started to really turn.

Davidson started to grow the business and by the mid 1990s, the company had made a solid contribution to every medium to large resource project in Indonesia and the Pacific region.

These included Kutubu, Kelian, Kaltim Prima, Freeport, Ok Tedi, Lihir, Emperor, Porgera, Batu Hijau, Gosowong and Gold Ridge. The company also expanded its global reach in the 1990s, supporting mining operations in Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Jamaica, Malaysia, India, Tajikistan, Laos, Myanmar, China, Mongolia and Thailand.

In 1993, JDA diversified into construction, establishing an office in Hong Kong to become one of the main recruiters of expatriates for the massive Hong Hong airport project.

JDA today has about 60,000 candidates on its data base, making it one of the largest recruitment firms in the country, with offices in Shanghai, Port Moresby and Jakarta.

Davidson describes his international data base as unique, something that attracted the advances of Workpac's chief Phil Smart some time ago – although JDA refused the purchase offer.

JDA's principal client base is the mining sector, the group placing all staff from chief executives through to mining engineers, although Davidson stipulates that the hardest person to find is a geo-technical engineer.

At just five years' experience in suburbia, a geo-technical engineer commands about $120,000 a year, whereas a similar recruit with five years in a commute role would easily pocket $180,000 with a supervising role paying "a very large salary".

Davidson acknowledges that the skills shortage is now at crisis point and says for the first time in the history of the firm, JDA is recruiting Indonesian and PNG staff into Australia.

"We are really moving into a situation where expatriates will have to be brought back into the country to help labour support, because we are not seeing the graduates like we used to," he says.

He praises recent government initiatives to boost the skills shortage although he says, basically, "huge amounts of money are required on training to avert the problem".

"The Government is making the right noises and doing the right things but the problem is that thing that are done now will take up to six or seven years before it has any effect," he says. "It is not just in the mining industry – it is an across the board shortage."

He says recent moves by the Federal Government to introduce English language tests for technical staff coming into the country is not the wisest of options.

Davidson says technical skills are essential but if the government insists on language tests for workers, Indonesian workers will be virtually ruled out. Davidson remains committed to Asia and PNG. "When the locals hear a mine is being built in Indonesia a local food shop or restaurant is quickly set up on the boundary and the creature comforts soon become very available."

This article was written by James McCullough and appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail on May 24, 2006