Dog Wellbeing Technician

This is a Fixed Term Contract for 6 months

You’re passionate about animal care and want to make a real difference.  You thrive in a hands-on environment, ensuring the highest standards of wellbeing for dogs

As Dog Wellbeing Technician, you’ll play a key role in ensuring the health and happiness of our dogs while they are accommodated at our St. Albans site. From daily husbandry tasks to monitoring their health and behaviour, you’ll be at the heart of their care, making sure they receive the attention, support, and specialist care they need to thrive.

You’ll be responsible for overseeing a group of dogs, ensuring their wellbeing and providing expert care in line with national dog wellbeing standards. Whether you’re identifying health concerns, supporting volunteers, or coaching colleagues in best practices, you’ll play a vital role in maintaining the highest standards of care.

You’ll take ownership of the day-to-day care of our dogs, ensuring their health, comfort, and wellbeing at all times. You’ll monitor their condition closely, addressing any concerns and escalating when necessary. Working in line with best practice and welfare procedures, you’ll make sure our dogs are happy, healthy, and well-prepared for their future roles.

Collaboration is key, and you’ll work closely with volunteers, colleagues, and external partners, providing guidance on dog handling, wellbeing, and fostering. You’ll also be responsible for transporting dogs when needed, keeping accurate records, and supporting the smooth running of the site.

You’ll have experience in a kennel or animal care environment (paid or voluntary) and a qualification in animal care or equivalent experience. Your knowledge of dog wellbeing, care principles, and health conditions will ensure our dogs receive the best possible support.

You’ll have strong communication skills, working closely with volunteers and colleagues, offering guidance and support. You’ll also be organised, adaptable, and confident in making decisions, ensuring high standards of care are maintained.

As the role involves occasionally transporting dogs, a full UK driving licence is desirable, but if you don’t have one, we’d love to hear how you can meet this requirement in another way.

No two people with sight loss are the same, and none of our people are either. So, we are proud to offer a range of person-centred benefits that can support each member of staff in ways that really mean something to them – and show them how much they mean to us. We offer a flexible benefits package, discounts and cashback scheme, a generous holiday allowance and matched contributory pension scheme to care for our people.  

You’ll be based from our St. Albans site.  This role operates on a shift basis, and you’ll be working 35 hours Monday to Friday on a rota basis; shift patterns are 7.30am-3.30pm and 10.30am-6.30pm.  As part of this role your duties will include opening up and shutting down the site each day.

Interviews for this role are planned to take place W/C 21 April.

How to apply 

Further details on the full role are attached below. When you are ready to apply, submit an online application form via this page.

If you would like to have an informal conversation about the role before applying, or require any accessibility support to apply, our friendly recruitment team is ready and waiting to help. Call them on 0118 3540345 or drop an email to [email protected].

As part of your application ensure you provide evidence and examples of how your skills & experience meet the criteria as set out in the attached job description. You’ll also be asked to complete a few job-specific questions as part of this application process, so please be prepared to write your answers to these questions. 

If you want to know more about the teams who work at Guide Dogs, you can find it on our Careers Page

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Guide Dogs welcomes applications from all sections of the community and actively encourages diversity to maximise achievements, creativity and good practice. We positively welcome and seek to ensure we achieve diversity in our workforce and that all job applicants and employees receive equal and fair treatment, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or nationality. 

As a Disability Confident Employer, we are proud, whenever possible, to offer an interview to all candidates that meet our selection criteria, and who indicate they wish their application to be considered under our Disability Confident interview commitment. For more details, visit our careers site.

If you are successful you’ll need to provide evidence of your right to work in the UK via our digital ID checking supplier; in addition, we cannot offer visa sponsorship at this time.

Every day is different at Guide Dogs. And no person with sight loss is the same. We work side by side, on our sites and in the community, in schools and on our streets, supporting people to live the life they choose. Our staff therefore also work in different ways to support the delivery of our life changing work.

Safeguarding

Guide Dogs is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children, young people and adults at risk of harm with whom we work. We expect all our employees and volunteers to fully share this commitment.

At Guide Dogs, we believe in fair and equitable hiring practices. A criminal record will not automatically disqualify an applicant from consideration for a position. Each case will be evaluated individually, taking into account the nature of the offense, its relevance to the role, and the time that has passed since the incident. We encourage all candidates to disclose relevant information, and we assure you that it will be handled confidentially and fairly.

Guide Dogs follow Safer Recruitment practices to ensure we are safeguarding the vulnerable people we work with. As part of this, we require a full work history with any gaps accounted for & a minimum of 2 professional referee details fully covering the past 5 years. If you are applying for a disclosure role, please note that you’ll be required to undergo an enhanced DBS check and sign up to the DBS update service.