A £400,000 investment is to be made in a fibre training school for Scotland to educate a new generation of digital engineers.
The news of the development at Livingston was announced today by Openreach chief executive Clive Selley who said the company’s investment in people and networks would play a big part in the country’s future economic success.
More than 4,000 people have applied for 400 new trainee engineering roles being created in Scotland by the digital network business as it gears up for a major rollout of ultrafast broadband.
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, with around 40 being hired to work directly on the rollout of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) in Edinburgh.
The Scottish capital will be the first city in Scotland to see widespread rollout of FTTP at speeds up to 1Gbps. Work is under way in parts of the city including Corstorphine and Newington, with places like Murrayfield, Abbeyhill and western Dalry expected to follow.
Around 1,700 trainees are expected to pass through the doors in Livingston throughout 2018/19, with numbers rising once work is completed on the fibre school later this year.
Visiting the Livingston training centre, Keith Brown MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work, welcomed the news.
“Educating the next generation of digital engineers is absolutely vital to ensuring we meet our digital ambitions,” he said.
“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.”
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.
“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,” said Selley.
“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.”
As well as being the first Scottish city, Edinburgh is one of only eight in the UK at the forefront of Openreach’s Fibre First programme, which will see three million homes and businesses upgraded to ultrafast FTTP by the end of 2020.
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