Location: Essex
Do you live in northeast Essex (Colchester or Tendring districts) or south Essex (eg Basildon, Southend, Brentwood, Rochford or Thurrock)?
Are you worried about climate change and want to do something to help your community reduce carbon emissions? Or perhaps you want to help people stop wasting energy, save on their bills and have warmer, healthier homes next winter? If so, this role might be for you. It aims to bring trusted, reliable, expert advice on how to save energy at home to people through face-to-face events and advice clinics in their local communities. For this recruitment round, we are particularly looking for people with home DIY skills who can carry out home visits in Essex, known as Warmer Homes Assessments. As well as energy use assessment and advice, these visits sometimes include installation of energy-saving measures such as draught-proofing or LED lightbulbs, so skills around this are very useful.
This part-time, paid role is for someone who wants to take practical action on climate change who enjoys working with people and is looking for flexible working hours.
What does an Energy Champion do?
- Gives energy efficiency advice to people in your community.
- Attends energy efficiency events and advice clinics.
- Recommends behaviour change and home improvements to reduce energy use.
- Provides information on home improvements to reduce and decarbonise energy use at home.
- Flexible weekday working, including some evenings plus occasional weekends.
You will need to be able to:
- Talk to members of the public sympathetically and confidently
- Complete the Energy Champions course
- Give advice that is correct and knowledgeable on how householders can save energy
- Talk them through the Fairer Warmth home action plan process
- Be prepared to support vulnerable and non-digital people with advice
- Commit to be trained in and keep up to date with technical and practical information to help you deliver high quality and useful energy advice.
What skills, characteristics and experience do you need?
- Customer service or people-facing experience – you must enjoy dealing with people!
- Excellent verbal and listening skills, and a good dose of empathy.
- A friendly and professional attitude towards the general public.
- Interest in and knowledge of energy efficiency measures and ways people can save and decarbonise energy at home (although full training will be provided!)
- Ability to work independently and suggest opportunities to extend the service if you see them.
- Organised and reliable with good time management.
- Computer-literate and comfortable using digital tools to give and track advice.
- Good administrative skills.
- Enthusiasm for combatting climate change by reducing and decarbonising energy use.
What are you looking for in a job?
- Something different and fun.
- No two days will be the same and you won’t be in an office all the time.
- Challenging and interesting but not overly pressurised.
- Flexible but regular working hours.
- Taking part in a programme of energy advice events to do something about climate change.
- Working with lots of different people and organisations to do something meaningful and empowering in your community.
What training will you be provided with?
The initial Energy Champions training course involves one day in-person training in your district, and there are follow-up online modules for additional skills and to train you to use the Fairer Warmth online tool to create energy efficiency plans for the people you advise.
Additional training and support will be provided as required, and funded training is available for those wishing to progress to Energy Advisor or Retrofit Advisor level and beyond.
The boring but important bits!
Working hours: Depends on the event
Hours per week: Up to 16 hours a week, more can be offered if available
Hourly rate: £16 per hour.
Terms of employment: self-employed, freelance
Management: You will be managed by the Energy Champions Co-ordinator for your area.
Location: Northeast or Southwest Essex
Other: A valid UK Driving licence is essential.
You need permission to work in the UK.
You must not have a criminal record.
You will also need to have basic computer skills in order to operate a tablet device during energy advice sessions, and to log interactions into a database if necessary. You will also need an email address, a phone number for us to contact you on, and access to the Internet to log your interactions and timesheets.
We value diversity and inclusion and welcome enquiries and applications from candidates with diverse backgrounds.
Enquiries and applications are open to people over the age of 18 based in Essex. As this job involves working with members of the public, a DBS check will be undertaken on applicants, and we cannot accept applications from people that have previous criminal convictions.
The application deadline is open.
Read more about the CommuniPower project and training opportunities.