ONE of the south coast’s largest house builders is attempting to recruit its own army of 500 former soldiers to help battle a skills shortage in the construction industry.

The company is working with Nordic Focus Training to retrain people from the Army, Royal Navy and RAF in bricklaying and joinery to help plug a skills gap.

This comes after Persimmon signed the Armed Forces Corporate Covenant – a voluntary pledge to help ex-service personnel.

All new trainees will also be encouraged to be reservists.

Speaking at the launch of the initiative, group chief executive Jeff Fairburn said: “We have worked hard over the course of 2014 to develop this programme to help us meet a shortage of much needed skilled tradesmen across the UK.

“Earlier this year we appointed a dedicated ex-military resettlement specialist, Tommy Watson, to spearhead the programme and we began welcoming the first of our new employees at the start of October.

“We are already on course to bring 500 new people into the business in 2015 and if our growth continues, we will repeat this in 2016.

“The new recruits are all starting on an 18-month training programme with time spent in the classroom and out on site.

“Our courses welcome new people every four weeks and based on the recruits we’ve already seen we are very excited with the quality of the candidates. Some of them I’m sure will go on to take management positions within the business in the future.”

Alongside trainee bricklayers and joiners, the company is also directly employing other staff with a military background into sales and management roles.

Persimmon will build over 13,000 new homes in 2014 and plans to open many more developments in 2015.

The builder has developments across the South Coast region, including sites in Portsmouth, Arundel, Horndean, Alton, Andover, Tidworth, Shaftesbury and Wimborne Minster.