Loads left BT because they had a nice voluntary redundancy payout. Like me
They thought the grass was greener on the other side, which it isn't, it's brown and almost dead
When I had my basic training at BT in the nineties we had two weeks residential overhead training, two weeks resi fault finding and two weeks resi ug training. Then we were buddied upto 6 months. Even then the 'oldies' were saying it wasn't enough and didn't trust you. The job ain't changed that much since then, maybe shrink joints have pretty much vanished but that's about it with the exception of BB but we had ISDN and Home Highway circuits to deal with. On a seven hour shift you only had to complete 3 jobs. Jobs were completed properly. You have only to see what happened to the NTL/Virgin network when contract staff took over. We weren't even allowed to set foot into an exchange or touch a bar pair!!