Openreach is going to create XNUMX new jobs, including XNUMX new interns, as it continues to expand its fiber optic network and expects at least a fifth of its new engineers to be women.
The BT-owned company plans to connect XNUMX million homes and businesses to ultra-fast broadband by XNUMX and has hired more than XNUMX engineering interns in the last couple of years to support those sacrifices.
This is the largest recruitment drive in Openreach's history, and it will also see three thousand existing engineers retrain to move from working on copper to fiber infrastructure. Still, the company says it wants its workforce to be more diverse, acknowledging that the industry has traditionally been dominated by white men.
open scope engineers
Just five percent of all engineering hires in 2018/19 were women, and studies suggest hidden gender cutoffs in job postings deter potential applicants. In truth, it is thought that only fourteen per cent of each and every engineer in the UK is female.
Openreach worked with language specialists to address the issue and saw a XNUMX% increase in requests from women, helping it achieve its goal of hiring at least XNUMX% women last year.
In the short term, he hopes to sustain this goal, to ensure that at least half of all external management hires are women, and to go even further in the future as well.
"Openreach is first and foremost a people-driven company, so I'm proud that we continue to invest heavily in our people, having hired and trained over XNUMX new engineers in the last couple of years," he said. the director of Openreach. Clive Selley.
"We want to reflect the communities we serve and provide opportunities for people from all walks of life, so I'm encouraged that we've recruited more women and minority groups this year compared to last year, more We have considerably more to do." in an industry that hasn't been very diverse historically.
"These new hires are going to play a vital role as we continue to improve services for our service customers and build the biggest and best broadband network in the UK, covering millions of rural and urban homes."