Recently, our school successfully completed its sub-project under the "Higher Education and Vocational Education Empowering China Baowu’s Overseas Mineral Development through Education and Training Going Global" initiative, jointly established by the Center for School Planning and Development of the Ministry of Education and China Baowu Steel Group. The project has produced a comprehensive intrinsic safety training resource package for local employees at the Simandou iron ore mine in Guinea, providing replicable and updatable teaching support for the subsequent non-degree education and vocational skills training at the Simandou Mining Institute.
The Simandou iron ore project, located in southeastern Guinea, is one of the world’s largest and highest-grade undeveloped iron ore deposits. It plays a vital role in safeguarding the country’s iron ore resource security and supporting high-level opening-up. As China Baowu advances its overseas mining development and production preparations, localized talent cultivation has become a foundational project for safe, stable, and sustainable operations. Given that the official local language is French, and that some local employees have limited literacy and face significant linguistic and cultural differences, traditional training methods struggle to fully meet the needs of job specific safety competency development.
In active response to the Belt and Road Initiative and the internationalization of vocational education, our school’s faculty team from the School of Public Safety and Emergency Management leveraged their professional expertise to implement the principle of "wherever enterprises go, vocational education services follow" into concrete curricula, specific job roles, and individual employees. They have promoted the dissemination of Chinese vocational standards, teaching resources, and safety culture to overseas project sites in more accessible and practicable ways, accumulating practical experience for Sino-foreign vocational education exchanges and technical collaboration.
Adhering to demand-driven and school-enterprise collaborative principles, the project team conducted in-depth studies of China Baowu’s job procedures, workplace prohibitions, emergency plans, and other materials. Faculty members carried out field visits to Baowu Group and the Ma’anshan mining area to gain firsthand understanding of mining processes, equipment operations, and safety management practices. Meanwhile, enterprise experts from Wugang Resources and Magang Mines were invited to multiple review sessions to ensure close alignment between course content and actual production sites, job standards, and accident response requirements.
Focusing on the module "Safe Operation Skills and Emergency Response", the school team developed resources centered on "Mining Equipment Safe Operation" and "Mine Accident Emergency Response". The deliverables include 20 PowerPoint presentations, 2 digital manuals and illustrated booklets, 17 animated videos, 3 instructional videos, 100 practice questions, and 7 virtual simulations of mining equipment. All resources have been uploaded to a digital teaching and training platform, forming a multimodal, bilingual (Chinese-French) resource system that supports learning, practice, assessment, and evaluation.
The project outcomes have passed acceptance review and are being continuously refined on the digital training platform. In June this year, local employees from the Simandou mine in Guinea visited China for study and site visits, during which they experienced Baowu’s learning resources, illustrated booklets, first-aid practical videos, safety warning animations, power distribution operation videos, and the online platform. They engaged in group study of course and booklets as well as first-aid skills training. Learning records indicate that the visualized, scenario-based, and interactive resources effectively reduce comprehension barriers caused by linguistic and cultural differences, enhance local employees’ participation, and improve the intuitiveness of safety learning—laying a solid foundation for broader application in overseas projects.
Going forward, Shanghai Modern Chemical Industry Vocational College will continue to collaborate with China Baowu and the project team to iteratively upgrade bilingual courses, virtual simulation scenarios, and skills assessment resources in line with the construction of the Simandou Mining Institute and overseas production progress. Our school will further refine the training mechanism of "job-oriented curriculum design, training-driven practical application, and assessment-enhanced learning", and promote the application of safety and emergency management resources in more overseas engineering projects, industrial parks, and international cooperation initiatives.