Overview
Role: Associate Director – Environmental and Ecological Assessment
Location: Bristol, UK - Hybrid
Role ID: 2025-3068
Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world.
Ricardo, member of WSP, is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading‑edge and innovative cross‑sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.
The Role
The Associate Director role within Aquatic Ecology is an opportunity to develop and shape a dedicated technical team, and build upon the existing extensive project portfolio, both in the UK and internationally.
Experience in engagement with clients, customers and environmental regulators is essential. Many of our projects are complex in nature and you will be required to work with other disciplines to create effective solutions. As well as driving delivery of our current portfolio you will contribute to the identification of opportunities and bidding for work.
Key Responsibilities
* Provide technical leadership across the Ecology team to deliver expertise in aquatic ecology investigations across all project stages, from bidding/feasibility/optioneering, extensive field survey programming, detailed design and assessment.
* Act as technical lead for the production of consent related technical assessments such as Habitats Regulations Assessments (HRA) and Water Framework Directive (WFD) assessments.
* Maintaining quality of service provision.
* Business development, client liaison and establishing new clients.
* Growing, leading, and developing teams and supporting and training junior staff.
Key Competencies and Experience
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1. A degree in a relevant subject, such as ecology or other biological sciences, and/or a relevant postgraduate qualification.
2. Demonstrable commercial consultancy experience.
3. Extensive knowledge of UK and EU Wildlife Legislation, planning policies, licensing requirements and best practice survey techniques.
4. Demonstrable experience working on large scale environmental projects.
5. Willingness to undertake line management responsibilities and a business leadership role.
6. Strategic mindset able to contribute to wider team leadership.
7. Confident to take on a mentor role to junior staff.
8. Flexible approach to working, with inquisitiveness and willingness to learn.
9. Ability to adapt to working on a wide range of projects.
10. Broad knowledge across a range of ecological disciplines with specialist knowledge in e.g. fisheries, macroinvertebrate or macrophytes preferable.
Desirable Competencies and Experience
* Full Membership of a recognised professional body such as CIEEM or ISEP.
* Advising and managing consenting applications such as planning, Development Consent Orders, HRA, WFD and Environmental Permits.
* Experience in Project Direction and technical reviews.
Working here
You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place.
We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on. Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable.
Work life balance
We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential.
Benefits
We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health.
Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.
Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion statement
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro‑actively with all our employees and to ensure an inclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.
Next steps
Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.
Ricardo is a Disability confident employer please advise the recruitment team via recruit@ricardo.com if you require any adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process.
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