Principal Engineer Strategic Mine Planning & Design | Exxaro Resources

Madidimalo Aubrey Phoko is Principal Engineer for Strategic Mine Planning & Design at Exxaro Resources, where he brings versatile expertise as a mining engineer with experience across both surface and underground coal mining. Over the course of his career at Exxaro, he has progressed through roles of increasing responsibility — including Pit Mining Engineer, Shift Supervisor, Head of Mining, Senior Mining Engineer, and Superintendent of Mining — before stepping into his current strategic planning position.

His operational experience includes optimising resource utilisation and output across a large mining and beneficiation complex, and leading a Central Control Room (Ops Eye) responsible for real-time decision-making across the value chain — spanning mining, beneficiation, and coal dispatch.

What sets Madidimalo apart is the breadth of his academic grounding alongside his technical career. He holds two engineering degrees from the University of Pretoria — a Bachelor of Engineering in Mining, and a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Technology Management — giving him both the core technical foundation and the systems-level thinking to manage complex mining operations. He has layered this with executive business education, including a Certificate of Merit in Business and Management Development from GIBS (Gordon Institute of Business Science) and a Distinction in Leadership in the Connection Economy from North-West University.

He capped this trajectory with an MBA from the Jack Welch Management Institute (2020–2021), graduating with Distinction and serving as JWMI Ambassador for South Africa — reflecting both academic excellence and a role representing the institute’s leadership philosophy locally. This combination of deep technical mining expertise and executive-level business and leadership training is exactly what underpins his current mandate: translating strategic mine design into ground-level operational reality.

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