Openreach Chief Engineer ‘career pathway’ delivers progression for hundreds with more to follow
Telecoms & Financial Services, Openreach February 4 2022
An agreement brokered by the CWU last summer to fast-track career progression opportunities for members in Openreach’s Chief Engineer division is well on track to delivering the transformed promotion landscape that was promised just seven months ago.
The scale of the progress that has been made since the initial rollout of the Chief Engineer ‘career pathway’ in June last year emerged this week following the union’s latest three-monthly meeting with management to monitor how the pathway is performing in practice.
Revealing “good progress across all roles”, CWU national officer for Openreach, Davie Bowman highlights the particularly impressive advances that have been made for those aspiring to the ‘Clerk of Works’ role – the highest rung of the team member grade engineering ladder within Chief Engineers
“No fewer than 430 brand new opportunities for team members have been created to progress their career to the top end of the career pathway this financial year,” Davie explains. “This now means that 49% of our members are at the Specialist Engineer Career Pathway stage – and there are 40 more Clerk of Works (Specialist) vacancies remaining this year, with more in the plan for next year.”
Turning to the ‘Senior Engineer’ level, Davie adds: “The new senior multi-skilled (cabling/jointing) engineer role has been created to give recognition and differentiation for being the best within the engineering field discipline, in terms of skills, competence and knowledge.
“There are 23 vacancies ready to advertise based on recruiting one senior engineer per senior build manager across England – and ten in Scotland, in place of Clerk of Works, to assist with ‘wayleaves’ as a result of the R100 fibre rollout programme.”
The CWU’s major focus now is on ensuring a step up in the pace of progressions to the ‘Advanced Engineer’ level. “Considerable promotion to Senior Engineers and Clerk of Works has lowered the number of engineers in scope – but of those in scope 41% are now at Advanced Engineer level, Davie points out.
“Overall this is a really good news story – and, whilst there have been issues associated with filling some of the vacancies – with other business units releasing people to take up the roles – there’s no doubt that the enhanced availability of advancement for our members to higher-graded better paid roles is widely appreciated.”
Updating the union’s BT Committee this week on the latest discussions with Chief Engineer division management, National Executive and Openreach national team member Andy Mercer stressed the union has made it clear it expects to see “more movement” from the company in terms of the numbers being promoted to Advanced Engineer by the time of the next scheduled meeting in just under three months.
“We’re just under halfway to where we expected to be by now on the Advanced Engineering piece, though we recognise the impressive progress being made elsewhere – especially with regards to the numbers getting promotion to the top end of the engineering scale within the pathway.”
Openreach national team chair Fiona Curtis concludes: “Previously there simply wasn’t a clear career pathway within Chief Engineers and Civils, but now people can clearly see what skills they need to progress their career, and it’s also far easier for them to have that conversation with their manager.
“This represents a really important step forward , and it’s also very encouraging that management has committed to hold a Chief Engineers ‘all-hands call’ later this month to re-start the conversation around career pathways, with managers being encouraged to use the resources that are available to upskill their teams.”
