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HAY RIVER
Stacie McSwain was working in a dead-end job in her hometown of Hay River when she came across an ad in the newspaper, which would eventually lead her to an exciting job in the diamond mining industry.

Snap Lake Mine control room operator Stacie McSwain is advancing her career with De Beers. - Thandiwe Vela/NNSL photo

The ad was for a mineral processing operator trainee, a job description that was foreign to the retail store employee in her early twenties at the time.

"It sounded pretty interesting, I'd never heard of it before and it was at the diamond mines -- I mean, how cool," McSwain said. "So I applied, I ended up getting an interview, and then I ended up getting a placement in the course in Fort Smith and it just kind of took off from there."

Today McSwain is a control room operator at De Beers Canada's Snap Lake Mine. She has been working at the mine since 2007 -- months before production started at Snap Lake four years ago this month -- and loves her job.

"I run the process plant ... where we crush all of our rock and extract diamonds from ore and kimberlite," McSwain explained from the plant's control room, where she oversees a line of computer monitors which run security footage from various parts of the plant.

About 2,240 tonnes of ore were treated in the plant last year and 881,000 carats of diamonds recovered.

McSwain likes everything about her job, she said, including the often-dreaded two-week-on, two-week-off work rotation.

"It works perfectly," she said, because the two weeks off allow her to travel and spend time with her family. "And two weeks in here is a breeze. It's no problem, it's awesome. It's just another home."

Women accounted for just 15 per cent of the 678-person year workforce at Snap Lake in 2011, but McSwain said she has not seen any signs of sexism at the mine.

"None at all," she said. "It's just a really good environment here, everyone's like a family.

"You could walk into the kitchen and you can sit at any table and they're not going to snub you away. Everybody's just super friendly."

She has also noticed more women being hired at the mine in recent months, she said.

McSwain is currently training to be a mine supervisor and is taking advantage of several advancement opportunities offered to the mine's employees.

"The way it works here is you get hired to do something like a crusher operator or a truck driver, construction crew, overall entry-level jobs," explained McSwain's coworker Jim Linklater, who operates the jumbo drill underground at the mine, which currently runs 480 metres deep. "You get trained to do different things as you're advancing and as you prove you could do your first job competently.

"It's just how aggressive you are and what you want to do with your life."

Cathie Bolstad, director of external and corporate affairs, said De Beers is "pretty proud" of its employees.

"We have a very complex mine to mine, and we've got a tremendous amount of talented people because it takes skilled people to mine something that complex."

As De Beers advances its Gahcho Kue project -- slated to be the fourth NWT diamond mine -- McSwain sees a long career ahead of her with the company.

"As long as this mine is open I hope that I get to stay here," she said. "And with Gahcho Kue opening a few years down the road, I hope that one day I'll be able to help out. There's always room to grow in this company."

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