Advice Services Manager - Housing; Citizens Advice Edinburgh

Citizens Advice Edinburgh (CAE) exists to serve its community and meet their need for information and advice in the most accessible format. Volunteers are at the heart of that service, advocating a model of community, social responsibility and resilience. A key part of this role, is to support the delivery of advice, in a way that grows and adapts to the needs of the community and changes in line with policy and legislation, where volunteers from across the community are supported to gain the knowledge, skills and confidence to help others in need.

In addition, you will be responsible for the delivery of comprehensive housing advice services across the city, in accordance with Citizens Advice Membership Standards and Scottish National Standards for Information and Advice Providers.  

You will provide specialist housing advice expertise, including: training; coaching; and supervision of general and specialist advisers (both staff and volunteers), ensuring policy and practice meets all legal and regulatory quality of advice standards and working as part of the management team to ensure continuous development of our services. The role may also involve complex case management.

A key part of this role will involve examining management information – primarily samples of case records and case checking – to identify any gaps in consistency of approach and practice across all CAE services and in partnership with other advice services managers, the projects manager and the CEO; identifying actions that need to be taken to improve practice.

You will work as part of the management team to pro-actively ensure that we maintain the knowledge, skills, expertise and resources necessary to meet client demand for advice to the standards required.

You will monitor trends in client contact and developing social policy and legislation to help deliver on our twin aim of exercising a responsible influence on the development of social policies and services, both locally and nationally, and representing the organisation in relevant forums to achieve that aim.

As part of the management team, you will help develop and deliver against the organisation’s strategy, with a view to maintaining the highest standard of compliance and where require, increasing the capacity and/or efficiency of our housing advice services to meet current and future demand.