Mineral Planning for Mineral Planners

The tutorial day was excellent and my sincere thanks to Chris Heffernan for an informative and productive session. It was also good to meet other people and I would encourage more face to face meetings during the course. I would also like to see a more interactive course with better use of AI to enable students to have a more experiential learning for example case studies and 3D visualisation together with more assignments to embed knowledge. Obviously this comes at a cost but there is also a benefit. There is a great deal of information to learn in the course but the fact that this data can be referenced as a source of information after the course is great and I think that overall the course is extremely useful for anyone involved in the minerals industry. It provides a very good overview of the role of a mineral planner in the UK and how diverse a knowledge base is required to discharge the duties competently. Well done IOQ for putting the course together and I believe it is good value for money. Joint certification by a body such as RTPI would add to the value of the course in the workplace and it's status amongst other stakeholders in the planning system e.g. NGO's and public bodies.

The course has been excellent for me, written in a way that can be easily understood, has covered everything I need to know as a Minerals Planner and has helped me in my day to day job enormously. Although I've had some internal training within the team and have been shadowing various Officers there is so much to learn, and my Manager and colleagues are very busy in their daily roles, so this has been a huge help to me in learning the job. The only negative if I was to find one is that it has been quite heavygoing, with a lot of reading in each unit, although everything I've read has been really interesting so I'm not quite sure how that can be improved/ condensed! Now that I've completed the course and read everything, I would like to download all the units to a series of PDFs so that I can retain for future reference but I'm not sure whether that can be done easily?...

As a qualified planner (district matters) for nearly 30 years many aspects were already known. However, it is recognised that most people will not have that knowledge. Some of the planning material was a little out of date, but it is understood that this course is being revised for the next intake. Notwithstanding this, the level of information and how it was presented was well done. It was of good 'bite sized' chunks which has enabled gradual reading and learning. The headings will enable reference back to clarify matters if and when it is necessary. The foundation of minerals planning and operations in such a way has been well done.