1,600 new jobs to be created at Openreach

Openreach has been recruiting men and women onto its engineering teams for
some time and today has announced a drive to recruit 1,600 more people as they
try to improve customer service and continue with the roll-out of faster
broadband services over the next few years.

“Millions of customers depend on broadband and they rely on us to keep them
connected, whatever the weather. Our engineers do an incredible job. They have
been rolling out fibre broadband faster than anywhere else in the world, and at
the same time completing hundreds of thousands of jobs each week to keep people
connected throughout the UK – an amazing achievement. “These new recruits will
be a welcome boost to that effort, joining an already world class team. We want
to attract the best in the country to a career in engineering. We are also keen
to recruit women – as I’m keen to dispel the myth that being an engineer is an
exclusively male vocation. In fact we have many successful women engineers and
it is my personal belief that recruiting more will also help our customer
service agenda. Being an Openreach engineer is a terrific job and a rewarding
career, regardless of your background, or gender. “

Joe Garner, CEO, Openreach

Details of the sort things these new recruits can expect are on the Openreach website.

While it could be said that this expansion of the engineering team is a
recognition of the problems in meeting various install and repair metrics it is
also a measure of how much work is expected in the next few years as demand for
superfast services increases and the gap-funded roll-outs push further and
further into more rural areas of the UK.