BT Recruits Former Military Engineers For Fibre Rollout

BT Openreach has revealed that it is seeking to recruit around 200 people from the armed forces to help in its rollout of fibre across the UK.

The former ex-forces men and women will form part of a mobile engineering workforce that works on fibre installations across the country. BT said the ex-forces personnel are due to start their jobs at the end of this month.

BT has been working with the Ministry of Defence’s Career Transition Partnership (CTP), which provides career guidance as well as training and employment support to people leaving the armed forces.

Labour Intensive

The installation of fibre is an incredibly labour intensive process, as witnessed first hand by eWEEK Europe when we visited BT’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) trial in Bradwell Abbey (a suburb in Milton Keynes) in October last year.

Indeed, BT also announced last year that it was doubling the number of positions it offers in its apprentice scheme, simply in order to train up a new generation of telephone engineers to help it deliver fibre broadband over the next few years.

BT aims to wire up two thirds of UK premises to fibre by the end of 2015. It currently has approximately three thousand full-time engineers devoted to the project.

“It’s fantastic that we’ve been able to recruit so many ex-armed services personnel. These people have served their country well and so deserve the chance of full-time employment with a generous reward package,” said Olivia Garfield, CEO of BT Openreach. “They are highly skilled, motivated and disciplined and have experience of complex engineering tasks in challenging environments.”

“Our “fast-track” recruitment programme should see the majority of them join us by the end of May and given their experience, we will be able to train them up quickly and get them straight out where we need them,” she added.

90 Percent Success Rate

“We have had an amazing success rate with this project, and have received tremendous feedback about the high calibre of the Service leavers who have applied for the roles on offer,” said David Duffy, MD at CTP.

“To date, Openreach have carried out 202 interviews specifically for Service leavers with 181 subsequently being offered positions. This converts to a 90 percent success rate at interview and reflects the highly sought after skill-sets, abilities and attitude of those leaving the Armed Forces,” he added.

BT meanwhile is locked a war of words with some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) over the price it charges for access to its ducting and telegraph poles. Some ISPs feel that BT’s prices are too high and unreasonable to allow them to roll out their own fibre networks, although BT has already signed up two customers for a three month trial.

Ofcom announced this week that it may step in and “regulate” the prices if agreement could not be reached between the parties.