About The Role
This role will be homebased geographical area contract with regular travel around County Durham and surrounding area, during the initial learning phase, travel will extend beyond this area. Working hours are 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.
You're passionate about puppy development and positive training techniques and love helping others grow their confidence and skills, alongside making a meaningful impact on the future of life-changing partnerships. This is a 12-month, 24 hour per week opportunity, and we are looking for someone with extensive experience with puppy development & volunteer management; including running puppy classes, working through behaviour modification plans with young dogs, and expertise in developing young dogs for a future life as a Guide Dog through the management and development of volunteers.
As Puppy Development Advisor, you'll support volunteers across your area to raise well-rounded, confident puppies through the Guide Dogs Puppy Raising Programme. From initial placement through to preparing puppies for their next steps, you'll provide hands-on guidance, coaching, and training to ensure every pup gets the best start possible.
You'll build strong relationships with your volunteers, offering regular one-to-one support, delivering puppy classes, and hosting group session - both virtually and in person. Your role will involve assessing puppy development, addressing behavioural concerns, and working closely with colleagues across the organisation to create tailored training and care plans.
To thrive in this role, you'll need experience in positive reinforcement dog training or canine behaviour modification, along with a strong understanding of puppy development. Ideally, you'll hold a degree in an animal related subject, such as animal behaviour, training and/or welfare/wellbeing. You'll be confident delivering training in a variety of formats and enjoy building rapport with people as much as working with dogs. Being organised, responsive, and ready to adapt your approach to each situation is key.
Experience in volunteer management or animal welfare is highly desirable, and confidence in using Microsoft Office and databases is important for maintaining accurate records and planning your workload. This is a varied and rewarding role where you can make a difference every day, supporting people and puppies.
About Us
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How to apply
Further details on the full role are attached below. When you are ready to apply, submit an online application form via this page.
If you would like to have an informal conversation about the role before applying, or require any accessibility support to apply, our friendly recruitment team is ready and waiting to help. Call them on or drop an email to
As part of your application ensure you provide evidence and examples of how your skills & experience meet the criteria as set out in the attached job description. You will also be asked to complete a few job-specific questions as part of this application process, so please be prepared to write your answers to these questions.
If you want to know more about the teams who work at Guide Dogs, you can find it on our Careers Page
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
Guide Dogs welcomes applications from all sections of the community and actively encourages diversity to maximise achievements, creativity and good practice. We positively welcome and seek to ensure we achieve diversity in our workforce and that all job applicants and employees receive equal and fair treatment, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or nationality.
As a Disability Confident Employer, we are proud, whenever possible, to offer an interview to all candidates that meet our selection criteria, and who indicate they wish their application to be considered under our Disability Confident interview commitment. For more details, visit our careers site.
If you are successful you will need to provide evidence of your right to work in the UK via our digital ID checking supplier; in addition, we cannot offer visa sponsorship at this time.
Every day is different at Guide Dogs. And no person with sight loss is the same. We work side by side, on our sites and in the community, in schools and on our streets, supporting people to live the life they choose. Our staff therefore also work in different ways to support the delivery of our life changing work.
Safeguarding
Guide Dogs is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children, young people and adults at risk of harm with whom we work. We expect all our employees and volunteers to fully share this commitment.
At Guide Dogs, we believe in fair and equitable hiring practices. A criminal record will not automatically disqualify an applicant from consideration for a position. Each case will be evaluated individually, taking into account the nature of the offense, its relevance to the role, and the time that has passed since the incident. We encourage all candidates to disclose relevant information, and we assure you that it will be handled confidentially and fairly.
Guide Dogs follow Safer Recruitment practices to ensure we are safeguarding the vulnerable people we work with. As part of this, we require a full work history with any gaps accounted for & a minimum of 2 professional referee details fully covering the past 5 years. If you are applying for a disclosure role, please note that you will be required to undergo an enhanced DBS check and sign up to the DBS update service.
For high volumes of applications, we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than advertised.