Openreach Chief Executive, Clive Selley, has announced a £400,000 investment in a fibre training school for Scotland in support of educating a new wave of digital engineers. In the run up to the company’s roll-out of ultra-fast broadband the giant telecom firm created 400 new trainee engineering roles in Scotland. Its recruitment garnered a significant amount of national attention and saw more than 4,000 people apply for the newly created roles.

Recruits to Attend New Fibre Training School

The new recruits will be among the first pupils to pass through the new fibre training school, located within Openreach’s national training centre for Scotland in Livingston. Around 40 of these trainees will be hired to work directly on the roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) in Edinburgh.

Around 1,700 trainees are expected to pass through the doors in Livingston throughout 2018/19, with numbers rising once work completes on the fibre school later this year. Engineers who pass through the fibre training school will receive comprehensive training – from picking up a job and setting up their working area safely to splicing together hair-breadth fibres or installing or repairing a line.

Edinburgh will be the first city in Scotland to see widespread roll-out of FTTP. Already, work is under way in parts of the city including Corstorphine and Newington, with places like Murrayfield, Abbeyhill and western Dalry expected to follow.

Openreach Investment Welcomed by Scottish Government

Visiting the Livingston training centre, Keith Brown MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work, welcomed the latest investment on behalf of the Scottish Government.

Brown said: “Educating the next generation of digital engineers is absolutely vital to ensuring we meet our digital ambitions.”

“I therefore welcome this investment from Openreach in their fibre training school, which will underpin the roll-out of high-speed broadband to communities across Scotland.”

Selley said: “Our new engineers are helping us provide better service, broader coverage and faster broadband speeds throughout the country, and this new training school will make sure they have the skills they need to get the job done.”

“We’re confident that our investment in people and networks across Scotland have a big role to play in the country’s future economic success.”

Learning in a Real-Life Simulated Environment

During the visit, the Cabinet Secretary and CEO visited the first of four new fibre classrooms at the centre – designed to provide a real-life setting for trainees complete with duct pipes, fibre cables and walls replicating inside and outside customers’ houses – and met Openreach trainees.

During this year a residential street will be replicated outside the centre to give recruits a safe, real-world environment to learn and practice every aspect of their work. It will have a live fibre network which connects a local exchange to an office, shop and houses through pavements, ducts, poles and cabinets – with an extra dose of reality added by exposure to the elements.

The indoor and outdoor simulations are designed to include everything an engineer would encounter during a typical working day – from cabling to jointing and repairs, working underground or overhead, up telephone poles and installing new services inside customers’ homes.