2026 Agenda

In this intensive one-day masterclass, you will learn the core concepts, frameworks, and practical tools needed to develop a robust ESG strategy on site. This masterclass will equip you with the essential skills and insights you need to navigate the dynamic world of ESG and drive sustainable success across your organisation.

By the end of this masterclass, you will have:

• Gained a comprehensive understanding of the key principles and components of ESG, including how the environmental, social, and governance factors interplay within a business context
• Explored industry-leading frameworks, guidelines, and best practices for ESG integration, enabling you to develop a holistic and effective ESG strategy tailored to your organisation's unique needs and goals
• Acquired practical tools and methodologies to identify and assess material ESG issues, measure performance, set meaningful targets, and report progress transparently to stakeholders
• Understand how to navigate the evolving landscape of ESG disclosure standards, frameworks and compliance, and be able to communicate your ESG efforts to internal and external stakeholders effectively
• Developed the skills needed to engage stakeholders, including investors, employees, customers, and communities, in the journey towards sustainable business practices, fostering trust, and creating shared value
• Participated in interactive exercises, case studies, and group discussions that will deepen your understanding of real-world ESG challenges and provided practical insights into effective implementation

By attending How to build your ESG toolbox, you will leave with a comprehensive toolkit to shape and enhance your organisation's ESG strategy. You will gain the confidence to navigate the complex world of ESG, identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and drive sustainable business success.

This masterclass is designed for mining professionals who are interested in learning more about how to integrate ESG principles into their organisation's DNA.

Women in mining work in environments where technical competence is expected, and leadership credibility must be continually demonstrated. But the leaders who move furthest and fastest are rarely those who are the most technically skilled. They are the ones who understand how the people around them think, make decisions and respond under pressure, and who use that understanding to build stronger teams, navigate conflict and drive change more effectively.

This one-day masterclass provides practical, skills-based training in thinking styles and leadership communication, tailored to the specific dynamics and challenges of mining environments.

Learning Outcomes:

• Examining the primary thinking and leadership styles that shape how people communicate, make decisions and respond to challenges, to understand why the same message lands differently depending on who is in the room
• Analysing your own thinking and leadership profile to identify the styles you naturally lead with, the styles you find most difficult to work with, and the gaps that may be costing you influence and effectiveness
• Understanding how thinking style diversity strengthens team performance and decision-making quality, and how leaders can deliberately build teams and environments that leverage that diversity rather than suppress it
• Leaving with a personal communication and collaboration action plan that identifies your two or three highest-leverage development priorities and the specific relationships and situations in your current role where applying them will have the greatest impact

Whether you lead a site team, manage cross-functional projects, or drive cultural change from the middle of a hierarchy, this session will give you a practical framework for understanding how others think and leading more effectively as a result.

• Identifying what gets women into senior operational roles, and building it into your talent pipeline
• Benchmarking operational leadership representation to identify the gaps and close them
• Equipping leaders with practical frameworks to make the advancement of women into operational leadership repeatable
  
  

• What has enabled women in your organisation to reach operational leadership, and how do you build more of it?
• If you could design a woman's operational leadership career from day one, what would you put in place that most organisations leave to chance?
• How do we become stronger sponsors for our own teams?
• What can Boards and CEOs commit to today that would materially change the operational leadership picture within five years?

• Presenting operational models to support flexible rosters, job-sharing and modified site arrangements
• Quantifying the talent loss and replacement costs of the early-30s exit to build the business case for flexibility and retention
• Identifying the policy and cultural changes needed to enable genuine flexibility in FIFO and residential site environments

• Walking through what the return-to-work journey looks like in operational and technical roles to make the difference between a smooth re-entry and a slow exit
• Equipping workers returning to the site with strategies for resetting visibility, rebuilding stakeholder relationships and renegotiating scope early
• Sharing insights from those who’ve navigated returning to work successfully to build a usable re-entry playbook

• Understanding how commodity-driven restructures unfold to strengthen your position before the decisions are made
• Identifying specific actions that make talented women harder to overlook when headcount decisions hit
• Advocating for yourself and your team during a restructure to protect what matters without putting your future at risk

• What does the ideal roster for a mixed-gender operational workforce look like, and what would it take to make it the industry standard rather than the exception?
• What are the common ingredients for successful non-traditional rosters and how would you explain them to an operation that has never tried anything different?
• What does the evidence tell us about the roster models with the strongest retention outcomes and what would it take to make that data impossible for operations leaders to ignore?
• If you could give every site manager in Australia one piece of practical advice for redesigning their roster to improve retention, what would it be?

 Share ideas, test approaches, and gain practical tips from your peers facing the same challenges. Each roundtable is designed to give you insights you can take straight back to your day-to-day role. You will be able to choose three of the following to attend, with each roundtable running concurrently over three time slots.

• Round 1: 15:30-16:00 
• Round 2: 16:00-16:30 
• Round 3: 16:30-17:00 

• What is the day-to-day experience of managing women’s health in mining?
• How should mental health conversations in mining be reshaped to address women's specific needs and experiences?
• For organisations succeeding in women's health, what changed first: policy, culture, or leadership?
• What initiative could most immediately improve women's health and wellbeing on site?

• Reframing your recruitment lens to ensure hiring criteria attracts talent overlooked by competitors
• Designing interview and selection processes to assess capability and potential rather than defaulting to unconscious bias
• Constructing targeted attraction and onboarding approaches for senior women re-entering the workforce or transitioning within the sector

• Examining the shift in what mining organisations are looking for at the senior leadership level, to learn why values-based leadership and cultural change capability have moved from desirable to essential
• Exploring why the leadership qualities women have consistently demonstrated are now the qualities determining who gets the role
• Identifying what this shift means for women at every career stage, to leave with a clearer sense of how to position your own leadership capability for the decade ahead

• Examining how zero-carbon lithium production is reshaping the global battery supply chain to understand what the shift from hard rock mining to adsorption-based extraction means for Australian mining
• Exploring the commercial and environmental case for sustainable lithium at scale to attract green financing and premium offtake agreements with major EV manufacturers
• Identifying the skills the critical minerals sector demands of its next generation of professionals

• Exploring how AI and automation are creating new roles and reshaping existing ones, to understand where the real career opportunities are emerging before they become competitive
• Identifying the practical AI tools already being used across the mining sector, to leave with a personal toolkit you can apply to your work immediately
• Using AI to sharpen your communication, strengthen your executive presence and position yourself for advancement, to accelerate your career in the decade ahead

• Examining which roles, the critical minerals boom is creating and where the entry points are for women to move into emerging disciplines before hierarchy's form around them
• Identifying what a genuinely inclusive critical minerals workforce looks like in practice & understanding what your organisation needs to build now rather than retrofit later
• Equipping leaders with insights focused on recruitment, career progression and investment that will determine whether the next wave of Australian mining growth is more equitable than the last

• Examining why smaller companies operating on Country often build stronger First Nations employment outcomes and what the relationship between proximity, accountability and community trust explains about their success
• Profiling mid-tier and junior mining companies where genuine inclusion is embedded in daily practice rather than documented in a strategy to identify what you may be over-engineering
• Challenging the assumptions that budget and DEI infrastructure are prerequisites for an inclusive culture by demonstrating the power of intention, consistency, and accountability on organisational culture

• Examining what genuine inclusion looks like for First Nations women navigating both gender bias and racism on site
• Assessing where RAPs, employment targets and procurement commitments are delivering real outcomes, and where the gap between promise and practice remains the widest
• Identifying the actions you can take to move your organisation from policy compliance to meaningful partnership with First Nations peoples