Openreach recruiting 195 trainee engineers in Scotland

Broadband infrastructure business Openreach has announced plans to recruit more than 195 trainees from across Scotland.

The Scottish Government has welcomed Openreach's recruitment drive. Picture: Iain MacDonald/PA Wire

The company, part of telecoms giant BT Group, said the recruitment drive would cover Aberdeen, East Kilbride, Glasgow, Falkirk, Inverness, Stirling, Wick, Orkney and the Western Isles.

The move is part of a UK-wide drive to hire 1,500 trainee engineers over the next eight months to extend the company’s fibre broadband network.

• READ MORE: BT agrees to legally separate from Openreach division

Economy Secretary Keith Brown said: “Working in partnership with Openreach, we are committed to extending connectivity across Scotland and these trainees will play a vital part in delivering this and other benefits to service users.

“These new engineers will be fully-trained and able to work towards a professional qualification, boosting Scotland’s skilled engineering resource for the future.”

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Openreach chief executive Clive Selley added: “Our customers need us to install new lines and repair our network faster than ever and by increasing the number of people working on proactive network maintenance, we can fix more issues before people even notice them.

“We are also continuing to roll out superfast broadband services at scale and making big investments in our network to make ultrafast broadband available to up to 12 million homes by the end of 2020.

“We want to recruit the very best people to help us on that journey and our new trainee engineering roles will offer people the hands-on experience they need to succeed.”

The company will be trialling a virtual reality experience to allow candidates to try out aspects of the job – including climbing telephone poles – first-hand.

Its recruitment drive follows an agreement reached between BT and Ofcom to legally separate Openreach. BT had faced growing calls from rivals to hive off the business and in November the communications regulator ordered a legal separation of the firm.

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