Traditionally, geologists are employed by companies involved in the exploration and extraction of mineral and energy resources. They are also employed by groundwater and environmental consultant groups, state government geological surveys, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO, state museums and universities.

The minerals industry remains the biggest employer of geologists. It is a commodity industry so that the demand for its products is cyclical, depending on global economics. The demand for geologists is therefore also cyclical.

Gold exploration and mining companies have been a major employer of geology graduates for the past 20 years. The gold industry is Australia’s third largest export earner, generating export revenue of about five billion Australian dollars every year. Prior to the 1980s the gold industry was virtually non-existent in this country, despite its rich history dating back to the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. The period covering the 1980s and 1990s has been termed the third Australian gold boom after the booms of the 1850s–1890s and the smaller 1930s boom.

The spark for this recent period of growth was the demonetisation of gold in the late 1960s, which saw the gold price run from around twenty US dollars per ounce in 1960s to over US$800/oz in late 1979. This massive price rise created a huge demand for geologists in exploration and mining. The industry has been cyclic since then, with peaks in 1978–80, 1985–88 and 1993–96, but the industry itself was greatly inflated during this period. Over the past five years it has been in a deep recession exacerbated by the global rationalisation of the larger companies, and the difficulty in raising exploration funds by smaller companies. The structure of the industry has changed dramatically during these past five years and these changes continue at a high rate. What will emerge from this period of rapid change is likely to comprise a relatively small number of large resource companies employing small teams of earth science-trained explorers and a larger number of small exploration and mining companies in symbiotic relationships with the larger ones. These relationships will probably see the smaller companies, with their lower overhead costs, assuming much of the risk of exploration whilst being funded by the larger companies.

There is no doubt that long-term security of employment will not be a feature of such an industry. Exploration professionals now and in the future can expect to change employers regularly. There is also a growing trend for geologists, particularly in the exploration industry, to operate as individual contractors to larger companies. Exploration geologists can also expect to move on occasions either through internal transfer or in the quest for employment.

Governments employ much fewer earth scientists but their careers are relatively much more stable. An added attraction is that they are generally based in the larger cities. Most governments have programs of geological mapping that require the skills of earth scientists trained in Stratigraphy and Structural Geology, often with added expertise in Sedimentology, Volcanology and Petrology. Geophysicists and Economic Geologists are employed to acquire, archive and interpret vast amounts of data provided by industry, and make such archives available to the general public. It is expected that the requirements of conservation and agriculture will open a new market for hydrogeologists in the future.