Contract Officer

What will you be doing?

The successful candidate will be the eyes and ears of the Waste Team, making regular visits to operational sites including public facing Household Recycling Centres to assess compliance with contract and legal requirements, scrutinising the monthly contract performance data and customer service standards.  You will be working closely with the Waste Services Manager and the Waste Services team on a variety of interesting subjects and working in a challenging and rewarding environment.

Where issues are identified, the postholder would be expected to where possible address these directly with contractor representatives or elevating as necessary to scheduled contract meetings or internally as appropriate. Keeping accurate records of meetings, interventions and outcomes is essential.

The role requires liaising with all parties to resolve public enquiries and service complaints and supporting office-based staff with administrative duties.

Regular participation in meetings is required with contractors and partner organisations to identify and address required service changes resulting from legislative change and government agendas as well as learning from and implementing examples of Best Practice.

The role will also participate in procurement of new services and replacement of existing services in preparation for contact end dates. This will include undertaking market research of available options and preparing reports to outline your findings.

About you

We are looking for someone with a background of contract management ideally within a waste related environment, but not essential, and a good understanding of Health and Safety in a contracting environment. Qualified to A Level/equivalent standard, although good work-based experience in a related area would be considered equivalent.

You will need to be self-motivated and organised as this role needs a large degree of autonomy for you to arrange your own workload in the most productive and effective way.

Good interpersonal skills are essential to enable resolution of issues with site staff, contractor supervisors/managers, service users and partner organisations.

A good attention to details and logical approach, with good numeracy, literacy and IT skills are needed to help interpret and present information to a range of audiences.

Our waste sites are spread across Cambridgeshire in locations that are in most cases not well served by public transport. You will need to be able to routinely visit, and attend at short notice in response to incidents, mostly working on your own. For these reasons it is essential that you have ready access to transport that will enable you to independently travel to sites.

Our benefits

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage…

• A comprehensive wellbeing package to cover all aspects of wellbeing, both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family
• Buy up to 4 weeks additional annual leave (pro-rata) through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Take your bank holidays flexibly to better suit your personal circumstances
• Make Additional Voluntary Contributions (Shared AVCs) to your pension with tax and National Insurance savings
• Access to development opportunities, apprenticeships and qualified coaches to support your personal and professional growth
• Paid volunteering hours each year so you can make a positive impact on our community during your normal working day
• Access to Peer Support Groups through our IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network
• Opportunities to nominate and receive Employee Recognition Awards
• An Our Cambs Rewards account, giving you access to in-store and online discounts as well as our Car Lease and Cycle to Work schemes

About us

Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.

Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off.   We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered.  We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs. Some examples of adjustments could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion. 

https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/council/jobs-and-careers