Anti-harassment training in energy, mining and extraction has a credibility problem. Most of it was designed for office environments, then pushed out to field crews with minimal adaptation. The result is a compliance tick that does little to change the culture it is meant to address.

The numbers make uncomfortable reading. BDO's 2025 Annual Mining Report found that 71% of women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment or discrimination at work, rising to 83% for women working on site. These are not outliers. They reflect a sector where field conditions create specific risks that generic training was never built to handle.

Why field environments are different

Three conditions make harassment more likely in field settings, and harder to address when it occurs.

• Isolation. Remote worksites, rotating rosters and camp accommodation mean people live and work together for extended periods with limited outside contact. Informal hierarchies form fast and social pressure to stay quiet is intense.

• Power distance. Crew structures in mining and extraction tend to be steep. When the person you need to report is also the person who controls your next contract, speaking up carries real professional risk.

• Normalisation. In environments where a particular culture has been entrenched for years, harassment can become background noise. New workers, especially women and younger employees, often absorb the message that this is simply how things are.

A one-hour e-learning module does not touch any of this. It tells people what the policy says. It does not prepare them for the moment a senior crew member makes a comment in the mess room and everyone else looks the other way.

What effective training actually looks like

Effective anti-harassment training for field staff does three things that most programmes skip.

It reflects the real environment. Scenarios need to be set on site, not in a boardroom. The characters, language and situations should feel familiar to the people going through the training. If a crew member cannot see themselves in the scenario, the lesson does not land.

It builds bystander confidence, not just awareness. Most field harassment incidents are witnessed before they are reported. Training that only teaches individuals to recognise harassment misses the point. The harder skill is knowing how to intervene safely when you are not the target, especially when the person behaving badly outranks you.

It gives people practice, not just information. Reading a policy or watching a video does not build the muscle memory needed to speak up under pressure. Training that puts people in realistic situations, where they have to respond rather than just observe, produces behaviour that is more likely to transfer back to the worksite.

For HR and safety leads, the measure of success is not completion rates. It is whether behaviour on site actually changes: whether incidents are reported earlier, whether bystanders feel equipped to act and whether the culture shifts over time.

If you are looking for training built around realistic practice rather than passive awareness, Kiin's anti-harassment training is designed to do exactly that, with scenarios grounded in the real dynamics your field teams face.There's a common assumption running through most AI conversations right now: that the race is to automate as much as possible, as fast as possible. And while that's true for certain tasks, it's creating a blind spot that HR and L&D teams are uniquely positioned to close.