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Description

This is an ideal career for a logical thinker. As a Mobile Heavy Machinery Operator you will operate and drive a range of mobile heavy machinery including backhoes, bulldozers, excavators, front end loaders or graders. You level, excavate, move and load anything from earth, rock, and sand to landfill and recyclable materials. Your job sites vary from establishing new roads, housing estates and industrial estates to quarries, mining sites and landfill/refuse recycling.

Career Advice - Mobile Heavy Machinery Operator Career

What you do every day

Before your day starts you will need to prepare your machine for operation. You will select or change any attachments that are required for your day’s work such as winches, scrub clearers, rippers or different sized buckets for digging. Working from drawings and markers, under the direction of a supervisor or engineer you may backfill trenches or load trucks with excavated fill.

Areas where you have excavated or scraped, are to be at the correct levels and alignments required for the site you are working on. At regular intervals you will perform routine service checks to your machinery by cleaning, lubricating and refuelling. While moving the machinery around to different areas within the job site, you must fully understand and work to occupational health and safety requirements.

Personality that best fit this career

Becoming an excavator operator will see you enjoy practical and manual work. You are able to follow precise instructions while working in a team environment, with or without supervision. You will need to be reasonably fit with good eye sight ,  good hand–eye coordination, and a logical approach to your thinking.

Best thing about this career

This can be very rewarding as you can sit back and see the finished work. Project description will change from day to day. You may have dreamt of this career as a young child. Now, instead of digging in the sand pit of your back yard you are moving huge volumes of earth and rock with a large and powerful machine. It’s a career to be respected.

Worst thing about this career

There is a large amount of travel involved as your seek work. Wet weather downtime can stretch the owner/operators budget. The initial capital cost and ongoing maintenance costs are never cheap and heavy competition means profitability is always strained.