Giganet unveils new Training Centre to deliver their full fibre future

UK Internet Service Provider, Giganet has opened its full fibre Training Centre in Whiteley. Boasting a fully recreated home installation environment, the new development is part of a wider strategy to educate all staff on the work they are carrying out.

Unlocking gigabit-capable Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) broadband across the UK, with its own full fibre build focussed on poorly served parts of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and West Sussex.

Backed by a £250m funding from Fern Trading, Giganet has grown considerably within the past year. In the space of 10 months, the workforce has expanded from 25 to 139 employees, with hiring plans that will take Giganet up to 200 staff members by the end of 2022. With the upcoming launch of its apprentice program, Giganet will be recruiting ongoing engineers over the next few years.

ISPs are competing to recruit full fibre installation engineers when there are simply not enough skilled and qualified to meet demand. Starting in July, Giganet will recruit, train and equip their own engineers, who will then be able to work in their local area connecting homes and businesses in their community to full fibre broadband. It makes the new training centre integral to the company’s impressive growth and staff development plan.

The Giganet Training centre will provide new and existing staff from all areas of the business, with tangible opportunities to learn what their technicians and engineers are doing on live sites. For Giganet’s customer-facing departments, the hands-on training helps better understand the customer’s journey to full fibre, in particular their dedicated customer service and provisioning teams.

Taking advantage of the space created from expanding into newer offices, the building has been split into two. Staff will be able to learn in a replica of the working environment, without any impact on a live customer. With the space designed to emulate the real network in the outside world, the facility helps non-engineering minds to experience a typical working scenario - from laying cables to making repairs, working at ground-level or overhead, and installing supercharged internet services inside customers’ homes. Upstairs, the premises have been converted too, with breakout learning areas and video conferencing facilities across two dedicated training rooms.

Jarlath Finnegan, Giganet CEO, said “To create a dedicated space to train people in our business is invaluable. Our mission is to become the Best ISP in the UK, and to do that we have to be utterly confident that we’re providing the best service possible. The Training Centre is essential to our apprenticeship program and future hiring plans to give our staff a comprehensive understanding of the equipment we’re installing and the gigabit capability it provides - helping every employee, regardless of department or role, to understand the business and customer better.”

With plans for over 200 jobs to be created in the regions they operate, Giganet’s Training centre couldn’t come at a better time. Investment to rapidly bring new staff up to speed will be of paramount importance in delivering a full fibre future for the country.

Millions of homes and businesses across the UK can already access Giganet’s full fibre broadband services with the network growing every day. Home customers can take advantage of hyperfast speeds of up to 900Mb/s with business services enjoying incredible speeds of up to 3Gb/s.