The latest email from BT is rather ambiguous and is leaving us all guessing:

Firstly, thank you so much for your patience. Recruitment plans for next year are very much in progress and we are expecting a firm announcement on when we will be able to commence the next round of training by end of February.

Please bear with us at this time - We will be in back in contact with you before the end of next month.

Option 1 - we'll hear something this week which gives us a month's notice so we can start training by the end of February

Option 2 - we'll hear something by the end of February, a month's notice (for most) means we'll start by end of March which means first pay will be April - the next financial year

I am hoping that the news of the training budget being approved means they are going to speed things up as lots of us have been waiting for months now. I was ready to start my training back in October, now I'm unemployed and looking for other work until this comes through.

I was given 6 weeks notice, but all the checks were done in days. Had 48 hours to complete the tasks required and sent disclosure Scotland and dvla check as soon as I received them.

I can't help wonder if you're all caught up with an internal financial quandary posed because
- BT haven't yet agreed with Ofcom about the legal control of Openreach
- The Italian problem

As BT's quarterly results were out, I happened to find their latest "Investor Meeting Day" slides from November/December last year, dated 7th November.

One bullet point in there was this:

In reference to www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance/Quarterlyresults/Investormeeting...:

c.3,000 Openreach engineers hired over 2014/15 and 2015/16; 950 additional engineer hires year to date and c.500 more to join before the end of December 2016

Thanks for the info makes a bit of sense of what is going on cheers!

They may sound like they took alot on already but I suppose their will naturally be wastage in those numbers such as people that leave the role and also if you look at the 2015/2016 full year they did have 290,000 engineer jobs per week and you think about it with their plans for ultra fast broadband by 2020 I think they'll need us guys. Keep the faith

About 23,000 engineers (with vans), so about 12.6 jobs per week each; or 2.5 jobs per day per engineer, assuming a 5 day week, not allowing for sickness, holidays etc - so probably about 3 jobs each working day.

Edited by deleted (Sat 28-Jan-17 07:22:57)

I've read on here that the usual daily job target is 5-6 jobs per day so 20-25 a week to avoid stats rage from your Manager!

Agreed that 3 seemed rather low, so I stayed withe the presnted total; and what I recollect reading about 12 months back; plus the likely adjustment for absences of vatious natures - from long experience of doing such assessments.

Thanks for your comment.

Although there is the possibility of back log which wouldn't be in the figures?

Edited by deleted (Sat 28-Jan-17 18:58:20)

There may be "backlog" in the primary figure, only digging in to OR reports may reveal.