Abstract

In Chile there have been universities that have trained thousands of mine engineers over the country's history for decades. Since 2010 multiple academic projects were generated around the career of Mine Engineering, based on the large investments and high demand for qualified jobs that was projected by government agencies for the 2010 – 2025 period. Based on this, public and private universities and professional institutes started careers linked with mining, encouraged by the media, which wrote in their main pages about the large amounts of money that mining professionals were earning, higher than those of any other professionals in the country. Since then, academic offerings have increased in an overwhelming and uncontrolled manner. However, the projections that would be generated by labor demand in relation to the professional mining engineering careers did not go as had been predicted. This paper reviews the traditional training that the profession has given, showing the current academic offerings in 2015, the projections for graduates up to 2023, and the job offers according to the forecasts of national and international economies. Then the supply and demand are projected jointly to show the gap that there will be between both situations. All this puts in evidence a discouraging panorama for the graduates from the different universities and professional institutes due to the huge oversupply that is foreseen.