Senior Adviser Southampton

Job Purpose 

 To support the day-to-day delivery of our local service for older people who are approaching Age UK Southampton for information, advice and support, and to ensure that they are provided with an appropriate in-house service, or suitably referred on. 

To provide face to face advice in our core advice areas of welfare benefits, social care and housing options, in a range of settings, including people’s homes, and by telephone and email. 

Key Responsibilities 

 Age UK Wiltshire's Information and Advice Service:

• Provide information, advice and casework, including support on more complex issues, during advice sessions and by attending outreach sessions and home visits throughout Southampton. 

• As one of two Senior Advisers, manage and develop a small team of volunteers to provide an efficient and effective Information & Advice service for older people in line with Age UK Wiltshire’s policies, and guarantee the efficient and effective operation of the Information & Advice service ensuring cover for absence. 

• Monitor and manage caseloads of volunteer advisors, ensuring that work is purposeful, targets are clear and caseloads are manageable. 

• Keep informed of developments in benefits, social care and other issues relating to older people, including attendance at training and events, and ensure that the team is appropriately updated. 

• Quality check casenotes of the volunteer advisers you are supervising and give constructive feedback, enabling volunteers to learn and ensuring their work is to the required quality standard of Age UK. 

• Maintain information systems and resources. 

• Assist with the recruitment and training of Information & Advice volunteers. 

• Record all activity and contacts on our CRM (Charitylog) and provide reports as required. 

• Represent Age UK Wiltshire at meetings and conferences as appropriate. 

• Develop services in response to client feedback, unmet need, social policy and best practice changes. This may include partnership work with other agencies and/or developing project proposals. 

• Undertake such other duties, commensurate with the role, as may be from time to time required 

• Where needed, provide a supervisory role during an advice session at our Southampton office. Assess enquiries as they come in and allocate a suitable adviser to deal with it dependent on the level of skill required. Coach lesser skilled advisers to deal with more complex queries leading to an up-skilling of all advisers over time. 

• Oversee specific projects within the I&A service and manage teams of volunteers who work on these projects. Produce reports on specific projects as and when required. 

Important: Please read the below job description for a full list of requirements for the role, applications are shortlisted against the desirable and essential criteria.

If you are interested in this role, please complete the application form below by 12pm Noon Friday 27th September.

Please contact recruitment directly by email at recruitment@ageukwiltshire.org.uk should you have any further questions.