ok so i have a mining licence of 4 already but i dont have access to anything because i never did basic miner training missions. now they wont pop up for me to do. does anyone know a trick to make this work?

Basic Miner 1 is a badge, not a mission. You get it by mining and then selling ore.

Mine and sell 500cu of ore. Once you have that first badge, you can see your progress to the next badge level in PDA > Character > Accomplishments, and then selecting that badge. Brace yourself: the next level is 15,000cu!

If you have just been xp mining and not hauling it all in to sell, or are filtering for rare ores, you probably have 500+ on the invisible "mined" counter, so you can sell any ore you find until you've caught up on the unseen "sold" counter.

Once upon a time, basic miner credits only accrued while mining off-mission, but thanks to the powerful lobbyists in the miner's union, missions that require ore now count as sold (Mining, Trade Guild Mining, and any manufacture missions that take in ores).

http://www.vo-wiki.com/wiki/Badges#Mining
http://www.vo-wiki.com/wiki/Mining

I hope it's not rude to hijack with a relevant question, but how quickly can I reasonably expect to reach Basic Miner II? I'm really looking forward to the Behemoth HM and 15k seems really hefty when there's so much flying back and forth between loads.

using a moth (120 cu hold) it will take you 125 trips fully load mining and selling the ore

thanks for the quick help guys. i didnt realize that was an award but maybe i should sell a few things then.

Ragnarok with 4 or 5 beams (grid limits) + the "autojett" or "MAID" or similar strip-mining plugin. Create a huge cloud of ore crates, then fetch a moth and haul in tons. Work close to stations unless the roods are warm. I rarely touch a roid that isn't at the ambient minimum 10 degrees Kelvin. Remember time to crate roughy doubles every 10 degrees, so if you work in a tightly packed roid field, switching rocks by 20 or 30 degrees K can quickly litter a sector with mineral goodness far faster than hanging on till 50 let alone the long-touted polite limit of 100 degrees.

Anyone with the Master Prospector badge will sell you a set of large-port High-Density beams, which anyone can equip, and if you get a hold of a pair of small port High-efficiency beams, take them to any non-mining station and they will ignore the mining 10 requirement to equip them. These don't pull ore fast, but drive down the average heat-rate of all your beams, allowing the HD's to pull faster longer.

Lastly, create groups and mine the same rock at the same time with friends, as it averages each member's ship's average heat rates as one great average, with bonuses per player in the group, where as they would add cumulatively if you mined the same rock un-grouped. 8 people in mining rags churn out crates for 30 minutes, then take turns having 2 people change out to moths to collect, so everyone gets a share in the cu's sold.

Commit to 1000 cu's a session and you won't burn out. Unless of course you are obsessive like me.