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What is the purpose of this role?

This is a rare opportunity to develop, manage and implement the communication and stakeholder engagement strategy for the progressive metering project, which is a 20 year strategy that embeds the roll out of smart metering to our customers. The smart metering programme will help to protect future water supplies, reduce leakage, and enable customers to manage their water usage, and their water bills.

Reporting to the Local and Regional Government Liaison Manager and with a secondary reporting line to the Head of Metering, the emphasis of this role is to positively engage with key opinion formers to facilitate co-operation and support for the company’s metering strategy in London. This will help ensure delivery of metering activities whilst developing the company’s reputation and profile through the building and maintaining of these relationships.

What makes this role unique?

This is an opportunity to use your stakeholder engagement skills with the most influential politicians in both local government and Westminster across the London region, to support the delivery of an ambitious industry leading metering roll out programme.

The complexity and importance of this project makes it a very interesting role. Progressive metering is at the heart of our business and you will find it very rewarding being involved in the planning, consultation and delivery of this important project. This is a high profile opportunity which will give you a good level of exposure across the business.

What will this role involve?

We can promise that this role will be extremely interesting where no two days are the same.

Key duties will include:

  • Identify, build and maintain positive and robust external relationships with relevant stakeholders in the London region on metering strategy and activities;
  • Act as an advocate for external stakeholders on the metering programme within the business; establishing and maintaining effective relationships and robust processes with key internal teams to ensure stakeholders receive an excellent service and their priorities are recognised;
  • Feed into the overall stakeholder engagement intelligence to inform the business of stakeholder opinions and expectations on metering, and coordinate the engagement strategy and key messages for stakeholders;
  • Support the development and delivery of regular and ad-hoc stakeholder feedback to track shareholder opinion of the metering programme;
  • Work with the Metering team, Communications and Brand, Stakeholder Engagement, IS and our contractors to support the development of communications and engagement to enhance customer experience on the metering programme;
  • Support the Head of Metering and Director of External Affairs on metering and ensure regular updates with colleagues across External Affairs;
  • Be flexible in sharing duties as part of a team to ensure continuity of service, including covering for other team members across Stakeholder Engagement.

What skills are we looking for?

We are looking for a Graduate (or equivalent) with experience in a customer and stakeholder facing role in London. You must have a strong previous track record of communications and campaign handling essential from a background in public affairs, stakeholder engagement, communications, media or similar. You must also have an excellent political knowledge of local, regional and national government in London and ideally experience working for a London Borough or a London MP.

The ability to influence senior managers showing empathy and understanding is key, along with the passion to understand key opinion formers and their needs. You will be confident, credible and diplomatic and able to form strong relationships.

Thames Water information & Salary

This role offers a salary between £35,000 and £40,000 dependant on experience and is based at Clearwater Court, central Reading but will involve regular travel to the London area and other Thames Water sites including Slough, therefore a clean driving license is essential.

Closing date

Applications for this post closed 11:59pm on Wednesday 28th January 2015