The role of a mining machine operator gradually reduces to monitoring and managing a technological facility in difficult situations as mining automation increases. The increasing complexity of mining technology leads to the fact that the driver’s qualification must be very high in accordance with the requirements of modern mining processes. The main characteristics of the work of the career excavator driver in the «man-machine-environment» system are faultlessness, speed, accuracy, reliability. The effectiveness of the entire system depends on how the human operator’s participation will be organized in the process of managing the facility.