Citywide Services Operations Manager

What hours will you be working?
You will be contracted to 36 hours per week. Your working hours will need to be flexible to meet the needs of the service, but will generally fall between 8:00am and 4:00pm, Monday to Friday. Occasional evening and weekend work may be required.

This is a fixed term contract for 12 months, with the potential to become permanent.

Where will you work?
You will be based at our offices within Turnpike Depot, M50 1EP, however, you will be required to work at variable locations as needed.

What you’ll do as an Operations Manager?
As an Operations Manager with Citywide Services, you will play a key role in leading our School Catering service and ensuring the delivery of highquality, reliable frontline services across the city. Working closely with the Operations Manager for Building Cleaning, you’ll help shape a service that thousands of children and families rely on every day.

In this role, you will take full daytoday responsibility for the School Catering service, providing strong operational leadership to ensure safe, highquality and customerfocused delivery. You will oversee staff, budgets, resources and performance, ensuring that targets and KPIs are consistently met. Working alongside the Service Manager, you will contribute to the development of contracts and servicelevel agreements, helping to grow both new and existing business.

A key part of your role will be maintaining full compliance with health and safety, safeguarding, food safety and allergen regulations. You will champion continuous improvement, leading operational changes that enhance the service and support the needs of our teams and customers. You’ll also develop strong working relationships with schools, partners, customers and other service areas, and you will have opportunities to lead or contribute to servicewide projects, tender preparation, marketing activity and broader operational development. When required, you will act as deputy to the Service Manager.

What We’re Looking For
We are looking for someone with proven experience in managing and supervising frontline operational teams, and a strong track record of delivering highquality catering services against performance targets. You will bring solid budget management experience, including monitoring, forecasting and planning, along with excellent organisational, analytical and problemsolving skills. The ability to motivate, develop and support teams is essential, as is uptodate knowledge of safeguarding, health and safety, food safety and allergen requirements.

You’ll also need strong digital confidence, particularly with Microsoft Office and public sector systems, and a commitment to Salford’s values. Relevant qualifications include a supervisory management qualification, City & Guilds 706/1 or NVQ Level 2 Catering for catering roles, and an Advanced Food Hygiene Certificate.

Your Development:

We offer a comprehensive learning and development programme, including funded professional leadership qualifications, career planning, support, and progression opportunities.

About Citywide Services:
Citywide Services is part of Salford City Council’s Place Directorate. We have been providing Catering Services in nurseries and schools across Greater Manchester since 1990. We are constantly striving to achieve the highest quality, healthiest, and nutritionally balanced meals to the 14.000 children we serve every school day.

At Citywide Services we aim to provide Salford living wage-paid, reliable jobs for our community, where every team member is given the skills and training to develop. Once a team member is on board with us, we work hard to encourage them to stay, as we recognise that our people are our most important resource.

We aim to create a great teamwork environment in which the opinions of all are sought and valued and to grow our future talent from within, with continued development and progression opportunities. Our training and development build upon the talents of our team by investing in their training. This ensures they are given all the necessary skills to deliver excellence. Our training includes nationally recognised catering qualifications, safeguarding, food hygiene, manual handling, COSHH training, customer service, and many more. Over the last two years, we are immensely proud to have provided over 30 of our team members with apprentice opportunities to gain Chef Production qualifications, with many of our apprentices having gone on to achieve career promotions within Citywide.

Benefits of Joining Citywide:
Working with Citywide is more than a job, you will be welcome into a friendly environment where your personal and professional development will be encouraged. In addition, we also offer a range of resources, rewards, and benefits for our colleagues and their families:

• Dynamic work environment
• Competitive compensation
• Full training and full protective uniform supplied.
• Opportunities to enable colleagues to grow and succeed throughout their career at Citywide, including apprenticeships and a variety of learning and development tools.
• Save for your future by becoming a member of the Greater Manchester Pension Scheme
• Vivup Discounts Scheme, offering great deals 24/7.
• A death in Service benefit for colleagues who pass away whilst employed by Salford City Council
• Cycle to Work Scheme to help colleagues to do their bit for the environment whilst keeping fit.

Please be aware that this post is subject to a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check and that you will be required to meet the cost of the DBS check currently £49.50. The payment for this will be deducted from your first four months’ salary payments at a rate of £12.38 per month. If you do not commence employment for any reason but the DBS has been processed, you will be sent an invoice for the payment of £49.50.

If you have lived or worked abroad for 3 months or more in the last 5 years or 12 months or more (whether continuously or in total) in the last 10 years whilst aged 18 or over, please refer to the link below for details for how to obtain your Certificates of Good Character https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/criminal-records-checks-for-overseas-applicants

Next Steps
If you feel like this is the place you belong and you have the skills, experience, and behaviours required for this role, then we would love to learn more about you.

Once you have read the role profile and submitted your application, the next step in the process is likely to include interviews and a presentation.

When you apply to us, we want to do all that we can to support you and set you up for success. Please let us know if you would like us to make any adjustments to our process that would help you.

For further information or to have an informal chat, please contact Lucy Clarke, Service Manager on 0161 925 1068.

Want to know more about Salford?

As an authority we are dedicated to improving the lives of our residents, and as an employer we are passionate about helping individuals to thrive in their work. We are committed to developing a diverse and inclusive culture and are proud of our professional accreditations which champion this.

Find out about our city as a place to live, work & grow, and learn more about the amazing work we are doing. You’ll also find out about the wealth of benefits we have to offer you here!

Continuous Service commitment

New employees can keep their service related benefits when moving between a whole host of public sector organisations within Greater Manchester, which include: Councils, NHS, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue, Transport for Greater Manchester, as well as many others under this scheme. Find out if this applies to you here.

Guaranteed Assessment Scheme

We have made a commitment to improve the employment opportunities for people with disabilities, care leavers, carers, and ex-military personnel by way of a Guaranteed Assessment Scheme. Our application forms ask you to indicate if you meet any of the criteria within this scheme, and so to find out more and if you qualify please click here.

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