Catamarca: Mining Employment Platform Now Connects Over 10,000 Job Seekers and 125 Companies

Catamarca's Minister of Labor and Education, Verónica Soria, presented a results summary of her employment and training platform for the mining sector, with figures reflecting the reach the tool has gained since its launch and a network of partnerships that the official described as “fundamental” to sustaining the model.

The presentation took place this Wednesday during a Mining and Employment congress held at the Mendoza Legislature and promoted by the Chamber of Deputies.

Catamarca's experience with lithium and copper can be replicated by other mining provinces.

The platform is a labor training campus that began operating in 2025, resulting from tripartite work initiated in 2023 alongside Salta and Jujuy —which together with Catamarca form the lithium region— with the participation of companies, unions, and the International Labour Organization (ILO), which developed an initial diagnosis on the most relevant profiles for the mining value chain in the short, medium, and long term.

The numbers showing impact

Since April of last year, when the job portal was enabled, the platform has accumulated:

• 10,100 registered applicants, of which nearly 2,000 already have formal employment, according to cross-referencing with SIPA databases.

• 125 registered companies, including mining operators, suppliers, and companies from related sectors.

• 612 job openings published since its launch, with 50 still open.

• 132 hiring placements in the last month.

• 3,127 employees in direct mining employment in Catamarca, according to the latest sociolabor observatory data from June.

“We seek to anticipate demand and information decisions,” Soria explained regarding the portal's role, which is continuously fed back by the sociolabor observatory.

Verónica Soria explained the scope of the platform created in 2025.

The case that proved the model: drilling assistants

The most concrete example of this policy is the development of the drilling assistant profession, a profile that until a few years ago did not have its own competency standard. According to the minister, the initial question was “how could we train a trade that could be learned quickly (…) and that would give us the possibility of labor insertion?”. Based on that need, the province worked with the then-National Undersecretary of Employment, Eugenia, and her team on developing and approving that competency standard.

From there, a four-part articulation was built: a partnership with a local drilling company in the Andalgalá area, an agreement with the National University of Catamarca to certify the profile, and the incorporation of the Mara project, which allowed graduates to do their labor training in a real work environment.

Process numbers:

Stage	Number
Registered	350
Selected for training	50
Graduates	38
Completed Mara training	16
Remained actively working on the project	12

In a historically male-dominated sector like mining, the official highlighted that “women's participation continues to grow” across the different profiles developed through the campus.

A network of partnerships behind the results

Soria was emphatic in stating that “cooperation and partnerships” constitute one of the central pillars of the system. This strategy is sustained on several fronts:

• Federal Investment Council and National Labor Secretariat, partners since the project's initial design.

• ILO, present since the first diagnosis in 2023 alongside Salta and Jujuy.

• French cooperation, key in developing training and competencies.

• Japanese cooperation, with whom Catamarca carries out a local development project in mining-influenced zones.

• National University of Catamarca, which certified the drilling assistant profile.

• Mara project, which opened its facilities for labor training in real work environments, both for campus graduates and for technical school and higher education institute students conducting their professional practice internships at the deposit, located in Andalgalá, Santa María, and Belén.

• WOCRA Foundation, IERIC, and Construction Chamber, with whom 60 workers from the provincial interior have already been certified in the construction trade but lacked formal credentials.

• FISCAP, to train profiles in mining equipment maintenance, as projects incorporate new machinery.

Mara project in Catamarca.

Certifying knowledge that already exists in the territory

One of the key areas highlighted by the minister is competency certification work in interior communities, where many people already have the trade—learned through work in mining or informally—but lack the certificate that accredits it. “Here the role of competency certification is extremely important,” Soria noted, because it allows those workers to quickly obtain formal backing for knowledge that is already established in departments near mining projects.

What's ahead

The ministry is also advancing in cross-cutting training linked to automation and artificial intelligence, a development that Soria described as “cross-cutting to all training we can deliver,” at a time when mining projects are beginning to incorporate more sophisticated equipment and demand profiles capable of maintaining it. The stated objective is for that training to be developed in localities near the deposits, so that skilled labor emerges from the territory itself.