Huawei on Friday opened the “5G Birmingham Training Centre,” the company’s first facility in the U.K. designed to enhance collaboration between local businesses and the education community and ensure 5G training is in place.

The new centre is 2,800 square feet and located at TriGate, Hagley Road West, Birmingham, B68 0NP. The office has the capacity to train 20 people at a time, with courses being tailored to meet training requirements. Huawei said that a typical course will last five days and will cover an introduction to 5G technology, principles of modern network engineering and hands-on practical installation of 5G network equipment. Once fully operational, the objective is for the centre to train upwards of 1,000 network engineers per year on the latest 5G technology.

Also on display, was the Huawei 5G Truck, an exhibition in the form of Huawei’s 5G Experiential which is in Birmingham to demonstrate 5G in action. Members of the public can experience Virtual Reality galaxies, streaming a live gig in 360° to friends or seeing how future smartphones will morph into tablets. Businesses and professionals will learn how to use cloud computing and VR to make education fully interactive, productivity significantly increased and farming digitalised.

In the UK, "there's no shortage of political will to deliver 5G, there's no shortage of commercial wish for it. There are some particular specific problems like a shortage of engineers, which we do need to address,", said Sir Andrew Cahn, non-executive director of Huawei UK.

"That's an issue mainly of government policy, making sure that we have the right people coming out of universities and colleges, but it's also for companies to deal with and that's what Huawei is doing while Huawei is recognizing that there are particular skills needed and so we're going to provide a training center to upscale engineers in 5G," said Cahn.

To accelerate the UK’s 5G journey, Huawei provides ICT products and services but also supports and contributes to the UK’s current and future 5G workforce talent development and skills training. In 2018 Huawei invested £1.3 million in its Digital Skills Programme and in previous years, Huawei has cooperated with UK enterprises and academies to provide technical training for the UK’s current and future workforce.

Despite Wachington's efforts to convince allies not to use Huawei's equipment, Huawei says it has secured globally 50 commercial 5G contracts and has shipped more than 150,000 base stations to markets around the world.