Highway Tree Officer - Kent Area

About the job

Role Responsibility: Highway Tree Officer

Kent is the largest county in the UK with 1.68 million residents and a workforce of over 821,600 people. With its bustling towns, picturesque villages and peaceful landscapes, the Garden of England is the perfect place to live, work and play.

An exciting career opportunity has arisen for a suitably qualified and experienced Arboricultural Professional to play a key role within the Highways & Transportation Section’s Soft Landscape Team.

This role is fundamental in providing the support to maintain and audit Kent’s 500,000 highway trees. Working with a diverse tree demographic this role will allow the post holder to influence and shape the future of the treescape within Kent through our street tree planting and ongoing maintenance programs.

The role of Tree Officer will cover all aspects of highway tree management, including surveying street trees, specifying and overseeing the planting of new trees, detailing maintenance works, scheduling of programmed maintenance, supervision of arboriculture contractors and providing excellent customer service. You will have a strong background in either technical or practical arboriculture and experience of applying this knowledge in a diverse range of situations, you may have experience within a Local Authority environment.

Please note – if you are interested, please apply as soon as possible as the closing date for this advert may be earlier than stated should a number of suitably qualified candidates apply.

To formally apply, follow the link to the Kent CC jobs site via the apply button. 

For more information about the role, please contact: Robin Hadley: 03000 413647 or email: robin.hadley@kent.gov.uk

Preferred Skills

Within Kent we value innovation and the use of technology to help us make key decisions about the management of our trees, striving for efficient, sustainable, and innovative ways of effectively managing them so you will need to demonstrate good computer literacy skills and have a good understanding of data capture requirements in the field.

This role is subject to holding a Full UK Driving Licence. This post is considered by KCC to be a customer-facing position. The Council therefore has a statutory duty under Part 7 of the Immigration Act (2016) to ensure that post holders have a command of spoken English/Welsh sufficient for the effective performance of the job requirements. The appropriate standards are set out in the Job Description/Person Specification.

Training will be provided to the successful applicant on all of our processes, in addition to a commitment to provide ongoing training and supported continuous professional development in arboriculture and related subjects.

Benefits Offered

The post comes with the advantages of 29 days holiday (increasing to 30 days holiday after 5 years) + public holidays, flexible working hours, hybrid working, an excellent local government pension scheme, sickness provision, childcare voucher scheme, staff discount scheme and support with professional development. This is a full-time permanent post (37 hours per week, Monday to Friday)