Overview

Reference – 12843
Contract Type – Permanent

As a consultancy of approximately 1,600 staff, we are large enough to work on high-profile schemes in the South West region including the Welsh Government Northern Access Road to provide improved access to the St Athan Aerospace Business Park and Aston Martin car manufacturing facility, MoD’s £1.4bn construction programme to provide accommodation for 18,700 troops and Penzance Heliport which will provide a new helicopter service to the Isles of Scilly. We also deliver smaller schemes to give you a wide variety of work across all sectors.

While we have introduced methods for maximising quality and consistency across WYG, we have adapted these to suit the ecologists, allowing us to react quickly (important given the seasonality of our work) and to allow team members to make decisions about their own projects with timely support from the senior management team.

We are looking for an Ecologist or Senior Ecologist who has experience of projects across a diversity of sectors, with the confidence to liaise directly with both clients and stakeholders, and who has a desire to support our growing profile in the South West. Strong general technical skills are a must, with a technical speciality highly desirable – those with experience of authoring technical ecological reports and those who hold a NRW or NE bat survey licence are strongly encouraged to apply.

We are keen to continue to grow the team and some enthusiasm to support our business development strategy would also be beneficial.

We also understand how ecologists think and work and have introduced ecology-specific measures to allow the team to fulfil their potential:

• With over 60 permanent ecologists across 12 offices, we work hard to operate as one cohesive team to minimise time away from home, maximise bespoke training and support from our in-house experts regardless of location, and to allow the best people to work on the projects that interest them and deliver them to the highest standards.
• We encourage the development of well-rounded ecologists who can talk about all stages of a project rather than a niche area. We don’t automatically pigeon-hole ecologists and instead encourage diversification of skills and the passing on of knowledge to fellow ecologists. We recently held our annual all-ecology get-together over two days where our in-house experts provided training, licensing and technology updates to help us all operate to the same standards
• Given that all grades of ecologist complete site visits and meetings, we provide cars or car allowances to every member of the team, including for personal use.
• Our bat handling licence incentivisation scheme thanks those ecologists who spend time and effort in achieving their licence – we know it’s not easy! And to show our support of personal development, we award a significant financial bonus to anyone achieving Chartered Environmentalist status through CIEEM.
• We work closely with many other WYG teams, including Planners, Archaeologists, Landscape Architects, Masterplanners and Engineers. With a culture of openness, there is always someone within the business who can provide advice and support for almost any query.
• We also have an established TOIL system which allows ecologists to manage their time to suit their specific personal needs, alongside the seasonal demands of the role.

If the timing’s not quite right for you, please do still to get in touch as we will always consider bespoke working arrangements or a deferred start date to attract good people.