From Mine Site To Building Site

With Josh Clark From Earth Architectures & Performance Training Australia

After spending two and half decades in mining then transitioning into the civil world, Josh Clark at Earth Architectures and Performance Training Australia knows excavators very well.  

Josh grew up in the small mining town of Moranbah in Central Queensland. His father was a coal miner, while his mother was a teacher. After working up and down the east coast in various roles, at 22 Josh decided that mining was the career path he wished to follow.  

Josh began his career driving a truck and gradually moved through various roles before becoming an excavator operator. He fondly remembers the moment he realised he wanted to pursue this path. While working on a civil residential site at the age of 17 in the peak of summer he was labouring intensely in a trench on a shovel when he looked up and saw someone sitting in an excavator, casually smoking a cigarette and blaring music. At that moment, he thought to himself, “that’s what I want to be when I grow up!”

Josh soon found out that the job of an excavator operator wasn't quite as simple as that and he loved the challenges it brought, deciding to make it his full-time profession. Now with two businesses, ran solely by himself Josh provides civil excavation, as well as excavator proficiency training for mining companies.

“When I look back at it now excavators have made my career,” Josh explained.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Josh worked full-time in the mining industry, conducting specialist training for operators to enhance their production output. However, the onset of the pandemic and subsequent social distancing restrictions unfortunately interfered with his work in the mines. In response to these challenges, Josh decided to start his own business in 2019, Earth Architectures. He invested in several excavators and shifted his focus to localised civil projects. This new business now handles various tasks, including residential and industrial development, stone and rock wall construction, landscaping, bridge abutments, road building, creek crossings, and pipeline projects.

Since restrictions have lifted Josh now conducts periodical training in the mines again. Josh personalises this training depending on the workforce and its size. How many crew members and machines will usually determine how long he spends on your site, but typically he will spend two to four months giving specialised and seamless training.

Josh prides himself on his ability to greatly increase the client's production output through small technique adjustments to operators alongside ensuring their upmost safety. “It’s actually quite simple, refine movements and stop doing the things you don’t need to do,” and he teaches his streamlined approach with operators in excavators of up to 700-tonne machines, which are very big and slow compared to the smaller machines he uses in his civil jobs.

Josh differentiated between his civil work and training work in the mines:  

“With the smaller machines in the civil world, you can do a lot of different things quicker, but when you get a 700-tonne machine, they're very big and very slow, so trying to do the same manoeuvres is quite costly, so it's about reducing the things you don’t need to do.”

“Companies can spend up to $20 million on a machine, so if they aren’t getting the production required, I can teach long term improvement techniques to operators to ensure they do.”

“Small technique adjustments can produce huge gains.”

“The metrics involved and the dollar value attached to those metrics are mind blowing.”

On the other hand, for Josh’s civil work, he uses a 20-tonne excavator, a 5-tonne excavator, a truck and a bobcat, which are ideal for the smaller-scale projects he handles at Earth Architectures.  

Josh’s expertise and longevity of career is what sets him apart from the rest. Not only has Josh been in the excavation game for 27 years, but his profession has also taken him to interesting places all over Australia, New Zealand and Africa, such as Guinea where he worked on the World's Biggest Iron Ore project training nationals.

Whether you require training for your staff in the mines, or smaller-scale civil excavation projects, Josh has a world of experience to offer and is passionate about helping newer to industry operators learn decades of experience.

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