Habilitation Specialist

Are you passionate about helping children and young people with vision impairment gain the confidence and skills to live independently? If you’re looking for a rewarding and impactful career, this is your opportunity to make a real difference. 

At Guide Dogs, we’re looking for a qualified and compassionate Habilitation Specialist to join our team. You’ll be working directly with children and young people across the region, delivering life-enhancing training programmes tailored to their individual needs. Whether it's supporting their mobility, building daily living skills, or working alongside families and professionals to foster independence, your work will play a vital role in helping them live the life they choose. 

You’ll start by carrying out holistic assessments, carefully crafting personalised habilitation plans that empower each young person to meet their goals. From one-to-one mobility training and school visits to residential experiences and environmental accessibility audits, no two days will be the same. Your expertise will help families, schools and communities understand vision impairment and how best to support it. 

This role isn’t just about training—it’s about advocacy, collaboration and impact. You’ll work closely with a range of professionals and partner agencies, always striving to ensure each child or young person gets the most out of their journey with us. You’ll also have the opportunity to guide and mentor trainee staff and stay up to date with the latest in assistive technology and habilitation practice. 

To succeed, you'll need to hold a recognised qualification in habilitation training for children and young people with vision impairment or be ready and motivated to study for one. You’ll bring experience of delivering mobility and independence training, a flair for engaging with children and families, and a proactive, person-centred approach. If you’re someone who believes in the potential of every child and wants to help them realise it, we’d love to hear from you. 

This is more than a job – it’s a chance to empower a new generation of children and young people with vision impairment to thrive. 

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.   

The Habilitation Specialist enables children and young people with a vision impairment to live the life they choose by delivering specialist services that enable them to become more mobile and independent. 

For this role you’ll be working 35 hours per week, worked 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday with occasional weekend and evening work. The nominated office for this role is Belfast on a home-start arrangement with travel required across Northern Ireland. Whilst the role is full-time, we will also consider part-time.  

About Us

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 will 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 will 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 will be required to undergo an enhanced DBS check and sign up to the DBS update service. 

For high volumes of applications, we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than advertised.