Craft Gardener

Leicester City Council; Leicester; On-site; GBP 26,000 - 27,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working

LGPS

Annual leave

Training & development

Travel discounts

Job summary

Leicester City Council is seeking a skilled Craft Gardener for full-time, permanent work across Leicester's parks and green spaces. You will maintain horticultural features, assist with hard landscape elements, and contribute to the city's open spaces with attention to safety and quality.

You will join a specialist team, follow COSHH and safety guidelines, and operate equipment while supporting a high standard of customer service to park users.

Qualifications

• Experience in horticulture or grounds maintenance.
• Understand COSHH regulations and safety practices.
• Able to read, write and complete relevant paperwork.

Responsibilities

• Maintain horticultural features and hard landscape elements across sites.
• Operate and maintain hand and mechanical equipment safely.
• Provide friendly guidance to users of parks and open spaces.

Skills

Horticulture

Groundsmanship

COSHH

Health & Safety

Manual Handling

Teamwork

Literacy & Numeracy

Job description

Reference: REQ8143

Description: Full Time / 37 Hour Per Week / Permanent

Join our horticultural team to make improvements to the landscape of the city. Leicester is covered by a wealth of soft and hard open spaces that includes a range of parks, gardens, country parks, nature areas,150,000 individual trees and 107 hectares of woodlands, canal, and riverside, 150 play and outdoor gym facilities, sports facilities, highways, and housing green spaces totalling 1,250 hectares. It is widely recognised that quality open spaces contribute to residents’ quality of life and improve physical and mental health wellbeing, with parks in Leicester attracting around 9 million visitors per annum.

Join our specialist team of Craft Gardeners to undertake high quality horticultural work and grounds maintenance work to maintain and further improve parks and open spaces and all other green infrastructure within the city of Leicester.

This is a full-time, permanent position working 37 hours per week from Monday to Friday. You’ll be available to start the working day at 7:30am and when required, work outside of normal working hours including providing emergency cover for out of hours. You’ll be able to work outside in all weathers, anywhere in the city and wear PPE where appropriate.

What You’ll Be Doing

You’ll work under the guidance of the Local Area Manager and Team Leader, to maintain horticultural features as well as hard landscape features including buildings. This includes preparing and applying chemicals, keeping sites clean and tidy, and maintaining sports features such as artificial surfaces. You’ll operate and maintain hand and mechanical specialist equipment in accordance with health and safety guidelines. You’ll be confident in providing advice to people using our facilities to ensure a high standard of customer service is achieved.

What You’ll Need

With previous experience in either horticulture or groundsmanship, you'll understand COSHH regulations and have knowledge of health & safety. You'll have the ability to carry out manual handling and lifting heavy equipment and materials. You’ll be able to work without close supervision, whilst using your own initiative as well as working well in a team environment. You’ll be a highly safety conscious individual in the day-to-day tasks especially when using specialist equipment. Using good literacy and numeracy skills you’ll complete relevant paperwork, and ensure records are accurate and up to date.

A full driving licence is essential as you will be required to carry out driving duties.

What We Can Offer You

As well as the satisfaction of helping to improve thousands of lives across Leicester, you can lookforward to a work environment that encourages a healthy work/life balance.

• You’ll enjoy generousannual leave, membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme and the option of flexibleworking.
• We’ll also give you the chance to develop your skills and expertise with a variety of trainingand development opportunities.
• In addition, you can choose fromseveralflexible benefits,including discounts on city buses and trains.
• Foran illustrative value of your benefits package,take a look at ourbenefits calculator.

Join us

We’re committed to recruiting a diverse and highly-talented workforce as we continue to build acouncil that is fitting and representative of our great city. That’s why we’ve designed ourrecruitment process to put you at your ease, make you feel welcome and bring the best out of you. We’ll do all we can to make our recruitment process as fair as possible. To help you with yourapplication,take a look at the ‘our approach to recruitment’ page.

If you'd like a chat about this post, feel free to contact to Mark Humphrey by email to [e-mail] or call 0116 454 3774.

Region: Central

Location: Various locations across Leicester City

Salary: *GBP*26,427- *GBP*26,847 Per Year

Package: Total benefit value (includes pension contribution and full holiday entitlement): *GBP*36,111

Contractual hours: 37

Basis: Full time,