Operations Volunteering Experience Coordinator

About The Role

Are you passionate about creating meaningful experiences for volunteers? At Guide Dogs, our volunteers are at the heart of everything we do—and we’re looking for an enthusiastic and organised Operations Volunteering Experience Coordinator to ensure their journey with us is both smooth and rewarding.

In this vital role, you’ll play a key part in making sure our volunteers across canine, children’s, and adult services are set up for success. From the moment they show interest to when they become fully embedded in their role, you’ll be the friendly, knowledgeable support guiding them through. You'll help identify where new volunteer roles could make a real difference, coordinate inductions and training, and ensure volunteers feel valued, supported and connected to the Guide Dogs family.

Day to day, you’ll work closely with colleagues across operations and volunteering teams to make sure our services are well supported and volunteers are prepared and confident in their roles. You’ll help maintain our volunteer database, coordinate training sessions, and lead on communication, feedback and recognition. You'll also provide light-touch support to certain volunteer roles, such as drivers, and help champion a culture of engagement and inclusivity.

In addition, you’ll have a regular presence at our local office one day a week, helping cover reception duties. This will involve being the welcoming face of Guide Dogs—greeting visitors, liaising with delivery staff, and ensuring everything runs smoothly at the front desk. Phone calls are directed to the central Guideline team, so this is very much a physical presence role with minimal administrative demands.

It’s a role where your people skills, planning prowess and understanding of great volunteer management practices will shine. Whether it’s collaborating with colleagues to make sure we have the right volunteers in place, championing award recognition, or helping to streamline volunteer pathways—you’ll be making a lasting impact on both our services and the lives of people with sight loss.

About Us

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.

This role will be based on site at our Belfast office, working 21 hours per week across Monday to Friday. One of these days will include providing a regular on-site presence to cover reception—welcoming visitors, liaising with deliveries, and ensuring smooth front-of-house operations. While we offer flexibility around how the remaining hours are worked, this reception day will be fixed to support the needs of the team and the office.

About Us

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.