Why Brazil’s Mining Sector Now Treats Communication as a Core Skill

At mining congresses across Brazil, a familiar scene keeps repeating: a technically rigorous presentation, built on solid data and careful methodology, fails to reach the room. Not because the work is weak, but because the delivery is.

Liana Joncew, a consultant with IBRAM’s standardisation committee CONIM, watched this pattern often enough to reach a conclusion. The problem was not individual nerves or the odd bad slide deck. It was systemic, observable at scale, and worth fixing.

Brazil’s mining sector employs over 221,000 people directly and generates more than 2 million indirect jobs, and its technical workforce routinely presents findings to congresses, regulators, investors, and cross-functional teams. When strong technical work fails to land, the cost is not cosmetic. It is professional and institutional. On 15 September 2026, in Belo Horizonte, CONIM turned that diagnosis into a formal training response.

IBRAM’s Mineração em Números 2024 places the sector’s direct workforce above 221,000 and its broader chain employment above 2.5 million, figures that establish the scale at which communication failures carry institutional and economic consequence.

What follows here examines the thinking behind the programme, what it taught, who it reached, and what it signals about a broader shift in how Brazil mining communication is now valued as a professional competency rather than a personal knack.

A systemic diagnosis, not a one-off complaint

The most telling detail about CONIM’s training initiative is where the idea came from. Not from an external consultancy pitching soft skills, and not from a survey. It came from someone watching congresses professionally and noticing the same failure repeat.

Liana Joncew’s observations were specific: technically sound content, regularly undermined by poor delivery and overreliance on slides. That is a diagnosis, and treating it as actionable rather than incidental is what makes it significant.

CONIM’s formal remit is coordinating the preparation of training courses on the content and application of standards, covering both open and in-company formats. Communication training sits comfortably inside that mandate, because a standard poorly explained is a standard poorly applied.

The organising philosophy The goal was to ensure that visual and presentation materials enhanced the core technical content rather than overshadowing it. Communication, in this framing, is stewardship of good technical work, not decoration on top of it.

That framing matters. It treats the gap not as a deficiency in the professionals themselves, but as a missing layer between capable work and the audience it needs to reach.

The workshop was held on 15 September 2026 in Belo Horizonte, led by Bárbara Joncew Schmitz, a specialist in strategic communication, change management, and organisational transformation. The session targeted mineral sector professionals seeking to communicate complex material more clearly, objectively, and persuasively.

The read you should take from this: the communication gap was not hypothetical. It was visible to a professional observer at industry events, repeatedly, which is precisely what justified formalising a response rather than leaving it to chance.

What the training taught, and why the curriculum design matters

The curriculum reads less like a list of tips and more like a structured answer to a multi-layered problem. Each component maps to a specific way presentations fail, which is the point worth seeing.

The training was designed to be concise and accessible, reaching as wide an audience as possible. But breadth was not sacrificed for brevity. The scope ran the full arc from planning to live delivery.

From the planning stage to the room itself

Before an audience is ever present, most presentations are already won or lost. Three components addressed this preparation phase.

• Content organisation: structuring key messages clearly and logically, so the audience can identify what matters
• Visual design: producing materials that look professional and support the message rather than crowding it out
• Anxiety management: treating pre-presentation nerves as a learnable skill rather than a fixed personality trait

That last inclusion is deliberate. By putting confidence-building on the syllabus, CONIM signalled that psychological preparedness is something professionals can develop, not something they either have or lack.

When the audience is in front of you

The second cluster covered the live moment, where preparation either translates into impact or does not.

• Verbal delivery: vocal technique and spoken clarity
• Non-verbal communication: body language and physical presence
• Audience management: sustaining attention and connecting with the audience’s level and interests
• Time management: keeping a presentation within its window without rushing the substance
• Handling unexpected questions: responding to the unscripted moment with composure

The breadth here tells you something about intent. This was not a slide-template course. CONIM treated communication as a multi-dimensional competency requiring attention from the first planning note through to the last audience question.

For anyone weighing whether this kind of training addresses root causes or surface symptoms, the design logic answers the question. It targets the failure modes, not the appearance of them.

What a professional from Samarco said she took away

The institutional rationale and the curriculum are one thing. Whether any of it lands in daily working life is another. That is where a single practitioner’s account becomes the most useful evidence in this story.

Lilian Lima Faria is a laboratory process technician at Samarco’s Production Control Laboratory (C3). Presenting project and laboratory results is part of her actual job, not an occasional set piece. She attended the 15 September session.

Her feedback was specific rather than aspirational. She described increased confidence when presenting, more structured presentations, and a clearer sense of delivering ideas with intent and audience connection.

Participant feedback Lilian Lima Faria described the training as essential for developing communication abilities and boosting confidence when presenting projects and results, noting that the tools and content offered practical, immediately applicable lessons.

The Samarco context sharpens the point. This is a major Brazilian mining operation, the kind of company where technical communication carries direct operational and decision-making weight. When a laboratory technician presents results, a manager or a regulator may act on them.

Regulatory communication demands in Brazil’s mining sector carry significant weight: when technical professionals present findings to ANM or other bodies, the clarity and structure of the presentation can influence how quickly and favourably a regulatory decision moves.

What Lilian’s account reveals is that the gap this training closes is not between weak professionals and strong ones. It is between technically capable professionals and technically capable professionals whose work actually lands with the person in front of them.

And that distinction matters more than it first appears. Confidence is not incidental to a presentation. It is part of what determines whether the presentation influences a decision at all.

Why Brazil’s mining sector is not alone in making this investment

CONIM’s September workshop is easier to read correctly once you see it as part of a pattern rather than an isolated experiment. Across major mining jurisdictions, communication has been moving from a peripheral nicety to a credited professional competency.

The clearest sign is formal endorsement. AusIMM, the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, runs a course that awards professional development hours, treating communication as a recognised professional standard. LSI’s programme links communication directly to safety briefings and site leadership, positioning it as an operational competence rather than image management.

Brazil’s own institutional picture supports the same reading. ADIMB’s MBA in Management of Mineral Resources was characterised in the Global Business Reports “Brazil Mining 2024” study as a capacity-building benchmark, embedding communication, leadership, and reporting within a broader technical and managerial curriculum.

Brazil’s capacity-building institutions have played a structuring role in professionalising the sector’s workforce over decades, with bodies like ADIMB embedding communication, leadership, and reporting within curricula designed to produce well-rounded technical managers.

How CONIM’s approach compares internationally

The comparison sharpens when the programmes sit side by side. Different drivers, one converging conclusion.

The AusIMM course runs 100% online over four weeks, roughly 10-20 hours of learning. Whether the driver is international collaboration, safety communication, or technical knowledge transfer at congresses, the underlying conclusion is the same across jurisdictions.

Brazil’s broader infrastructure reinforces this. IBRAM’s cooperation agreements with Sebrae and ApexBrasil expand workforce competitiveness and international-facing requirements, while the five-year ANM-IBRAM technical cooperation agreement provides specialised training for regulatory staff via UNIBRAM as part of institutional modernisation.

What this tells you is that CONIM is responding to a real, recognised pressure. Communication is increasingly treated as infrastructure that lets technical knowledge do its intended work.

What a workshop about slide design is really about

Strip the initiative back to its essentials and three threads point in one direction. The diagnosis came from congress observations. The response was an integrated curriculum. The evidence arrived through a practitioner at Samarco. Together they say the sector has concluded that technical excellence is necessary but no longer sufficient.

The counterarguments deserve honest engagement rather than dismissal. Critics of communication training in technical industries raise fair concerns: short courses can risk emphasising aesthetics over analytical rigour, training time carries an opportunity cost in a sector facing rapid technical change, and polish can occasionally substitute for substance.

Those concerns are real, but the design answers them. CONIM’s curriculum links communication to the clarity and persuasiveness of technical content, not to presentation style alone, and the international rationale, safety and career advancement, ties the skill to measurable outcomes rather than image.

The sharpest implication For any professional who presents technical work, whether at a congress, in a boardroom, or to a regulator, this initiative signals that the industry now expects communication to be learned, practised, and improved, the same way technical methodology is.

The forward-looking dimension gives the point weight. Brazil’s sector generated 8,786 new positions between January and August 2024 and is scaling to meet critical minerals demand, engaging more with international investors, regulators, and partners.

Brazil’s critical minerals strategy is reshaping the professional demands placed on its technical workforce, as international engagement with investors, regulators, and partners increases the premium on clear, credible communication of technical findings.

In that environment, the ability to communicate technical work clearly becomes a competitive and institutional asset, not an elective courtesy. The IBRAM agreements with ApexBrasil and Sebrae make the same case at sector level: capacity to communicate matters when the audience is global.

So the workshop about slide design is really about a redefinition of professional competency. What a technically focused professional should take from it is straightforward. The bar has moved, and it now includes how clearly your work reaches the people who act on it.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions.