Housing Officer careers in Progress | Tola's story
Our Director of Housing Operations, Tola Adesemowo, talks about the value of the housing officer role and the importance of the role to the sector and making a difference in the lives of tenants and customers.
The Better Social Housing Review (BSHR) identifies three essential elements to housing providers being able to deliver their core purpose of providing decent and safe homes. These are tenants, stock and staff.
To support our work delivering against the BSHR recommendations and the Consumer Standards regulations, we've spoken to some of our colleagues at the Group about their careers as a housing officer. They have discussed the highs, the lows, the challenges, the opportunities, and what drives people to succeed in the sector - all with the aim of promoting the role as a valued and supported career opportunity.
Firstly, we spoke to Tola, our Director of Housing Operations, who started her career as a housing officer after being inspired by her personal experience of social housing back in the 1990s.
She tells us why and how she built her career in the social housing sector, and why she believes the housing officer role is still so invaluable to our vision here at Progress of ensuring that everyone has a place to call home and supporting people to live their best lives.
Here's an extract of our interview with Tola:
In the late 1990s I was living in a local authority flat with two young children and had no heating. I felt that I was treated quite indifferently as a tenant by the local authority but one day I got a knock on the door, a young woman introduced herself as Lisa, the new housing officer for the area. Lisa really helped me over the next few months, eventually helping me move to a house with heating with my partner and children.
Meeting Lisa really spurred me on to want to work in housing. So, I went to college, completed a degree specialising in housing, and, a few weeks after I graduated, I got a role as a housing officer. It was one of the best days of my life and my career took off from there.
What did you most enjoy about the role?
The variety; no two days are the same, and I really liked helping people and partnership working with other organisations. I was working with asylum seekers and people experiencing domestic abuse, and it was really rewarding to help them settle into their new properties and to see them flourish. Working in the patch that I was in, really heightened my awareness of some of the extremely difficult challenges that that people face in their day-to-day lives.
What training and qualification opportunities supported you in your career development?
I've been very lucky. My housing officer role was designated as a training post so literally the following week after starting in the role, I enrolled on a post-graduate diploma in housing which really helped with a lot of the theory around housing policy and practice, and supplemented the operational experience I was getting at work. The opportunities are still there for people if they want them.
The role of our housing officers (those of our colleagues who interact with tenants on a daily basis and liaise with them about their properties) is imperative to achieving our vision of ensuring that everyone has a place to call home and the opportunity to live their best lives. What would you say are the main responsibilities of the housing officer role?
Tenancy management and management of the locality. A big factor is accessing support for people and also engaging with the community. Other key responsibilities include ensuring that we've got smooth start and end of tenancy processes, dealing with property condition, and helping people navigate the help and resources available to them.
What are some of the challenges our housing colleagues currently face in their roles?
Managing priorities. It's a very busy workload and it can be a very unpredictable. Accessing support for people can be hard, particularly around mental health, and managing challenging behaviour and supporting people to deal with that, as well as managing expectations of colleagues and of tenants.
And the opportunities?
The role is very varied so it's really quite interesting. A housing officer learns lots of different things about housing be it legislation budgets, allocations, managing tenancies, exchanges, navigating mental health and other support, so there's lots of opportunities there. It's a really good grounding for different roles within housing because you get to learn a bit of everything.
A key recommendation in the better social housing review report is to promote the housing officer role and to invest in continuing professional development for people in these roles. How do you think that here at Progress we can support our colleagues so that we can continue to improve the services that we deliver to our tenants?
Promoting the work our housing teams do is really important. Case studies can help with this. There's also lots of opportunities for people to go out on the estates and on schemes and see the work they do and get involved.
Training is obviously really important; making sure that we've got the right training opportunities so that people can keep up-to-date. Having effective processes in place is key and making sure people have the budgets and the tools to enable them to do their jobs.
I think it's also important for people to feel appreciated and valued, sometimes that's just a simple thing like saying thank you, but it's also incorporating day-to-day support, encouragement, coaching and mentoring into our culture as a Group.