Visitor Centre Welcome (Volunteer Visitor Centre Senior Meet & Greet - Dungeness)

We love to welcome visitors to Dungeness so they can experience the open miles of shingle landscape, wet grassland, stunning wildflower meadows and all the amazing wildlife that lives on our beautiful reserve. In order to ensure that our visitors get the best experience possible, we assign a duty manager to oversee the smooth running of the visitor centre. We’re looking for people who would like to train to carry out this role when cover is needed.

What does the role involve?

This role will involve initially spending time as one of our Visitor Centre Welcome Volunteers to get to know how the centre runs. Whilst carrying out this role you will receive training and development by working alongside the staff fulfilling the duty manager role and learn the tasks and procedures involved. These include:-

• Supporting the day volunteers
• Working on the welcome desk when required
• Answering the phone
• Carrying out car park checks
• Setting up the visitor centre for events or public use
• Carry out First Aid training, Fire Safety. Allergen and Safeguarding training and keep these courses updated.
• Liaise with the Site Manager, warden team or Visitor Experience Officers on the tasks needed for the day, but also if there is anything that needs to be brought to their attention.
• Open up or/Lock up the Visitor Centre at the beginning/end of the day and ensure that everything has been left safe and tidy.
• Supporting the team’s use of the i-zettle and membership tablet.

What’s in it for you?

• This is a great role where you can combine being surrounded by wildlife with chatting to new people and sharing your passion for your local reserve. What’s more, it has been proven that spending time in nature and connecting with people benefits your mental health.
• You will have pride in making every visit a brilliant one and hearing the positive comments from the visitors.
• You can make an impact to the team and to the visitor experience by feeding in your ideas for the Visitor Centre & Visitor Experience.
• We will give you a full induction to the reserve, have safeguarding measures in place and give you all the training you need. You will also get to know our reserve, it’s people and the wildlife.
• This role is a fantastic way to gain valuable experience of being a duty manager that can be used for future employment in any visitor or catering environment.
• We can cover the cost of you getting here.

What skills and experience do I need?

No previous experience is necessary, and you don’t need to be birdy!

The attributes for this role include:-

• You will need to feel confident about supervising the Visitor Centre during your shift while staff are off site, albeit contactable by phone. Taking initiative when needed.
• You will need to be reliable and committed.
• You will need to be a good communicator.
• Attentive, warm & engaging with a real love of chatting to people and wanting to make a difference to someone’s day.
• Able to multi-task and prioritise.
• Able to follow and complete procedures and record these.

Initially you’ll be asked to do a morning or afternoon shift once a week in the role of Welcome Volunteer as you are being trained. When you’re confident in the duty manager role you’ll be asked to help with ad-hoc cover which you can fit around your other commitments.

*“Thank you for reading this role description. Clicking on ‘more about this role’ and the downloadable pdf will give you just the generic role profile for this opportunity. A role profile is the family to which an opportunity belongs and informs vetting and training requirements and may not be an exact fit to the role described above.” *