Jobs

Who are we?

We are Scotland’s design museum. Designed for everyone, firing imaginations and sparking curiosity in design across Scotland and around the world. At V&A Dundee we are on a mission to inspire and empower through design.

Design shapes our world, it’s part of everyday life and it’s everywhere. We are a museum with energy and have a vision of the future where everyone is inspired through design and recognizes its far-reaching impact in our lives.

We are a welcoming place for people of Dundee to explore design and to use as an everyday part of their city, as well as inviting visitors from around the world. We are part of the V&A family of museums that celebrate creativity in all its forms from across centuries, for everyone.

Role profile

The Operations Department is responsible for the daily operation and visitor experience at V&A Dundee.

Functions include the management and maintenance of the building and facilities, security, operational delivery of events, box office and ticketing, retail and commercial development, and catering.

Department objectives are to operate the V&A Dundee to optimum levels of efficiency and excellence, to both create and facilitate a world-class visitor experience and ensure that all of our visitors are welcomed in a safe, accessible environment, supporting our vision and mission to generate enjoyment and a deep understanding of design through a pioneering public programme, visitor, and digital experience, as well as to generate income to contribute to the financial sustainability of the museum via its commercial enterprises.

Reporting to the Head of Visitor Experience, and working closely with the Head of Building Operations, the position sits as part of V&A Dundee’s duty management team, facilitating the effective day to day running of the museum.

Whilst assuming full duty management responsibility of the building, the Visitor Experience Manager puts the visitor journey at the heart of everything they do, ensuring the delivery of a consistently world-class, 5* experience, for everyone who comes to see us. They supervise the smooth running and support the Head of Visitor Experience with the continued development and improvement of all functions that sit within the visitor operations remit. These functions include, but are not limited to, retail, ticketing and box office, gallery staffing and object invigilation, and events delivery. Our Visitor Experience Manager are also a key point of liaison for our contracted staff across cleaning, security and catering services, ensuring excellent rapport and sustained relationships that are conducive to a cohesive and integrated visitor journey of the highest standard.

A high degree of flexibility and the ability to manage effectively, both directly and by influence, is key to this role, assuming line management responsibility for a team of Visitor Assistants. Our Visitor Experience Managers foster an environment that inspires the best in their team, working collaboratively to ensure everyone is heard and ideas are nurtured. Management experience in a busy, customer service environment is essential, along with the ability to prioritise and delegate as required. Excellent working knowledge and promotion of Health and Safety, as well the ability to coordinate response to emergency situations, is an important part of their working day.

The Visitor Experience Manager – Planning & Recruitment is responsible for inducting all new members of the visitor experience team and providing them with comprehensive training on the organisation and its standards. Collaboration with finance, the head of visitor experience, and operations is essential. This collaboration is crucial for planning deployments for future exhibitions and events. It ensures both excellent visitor experiences and compliance with insurance requirements. The role requires offering insights on how proposed changes to procedures, staffing, and contracts will impact the museum floor. It also involves developing plans to implement these changes without compromising the standard of service.

Additionally, the role involves arranging all necessary health and safety training for new team members. It also includes overseeing the recruitment and induction of the Visitor Assistant team, verifying right-to-work documentation, and scheduling shifts.

Duties and Responsibilities
Duty Management/Building & Security Operations:

Oversee and manage the daily operation of the public facing areas of the museum, striving to achieve the highest standards of customer service and ensuring the delivery of a consistently world-class, 5* visitor experience, in line with Visit Scotland’s quality assurance grading, for everyone who comes to see us.

Act as a key holder, performing opening and closing procedures. This will include occasional out of hours emergency response, as agreed with the Head of Visitor Experience.

Ensure the highest standards of cleanliness and facility conditions, performing regular audits and escalating problems that deviate.

Oversee the daily management and security of the Gallery spaces, reporting any maintenance issues and object damage.

Conduct pre and post-shift briefings for the Front of House staff, ensuring that they have the necessary information to support our visitors, and gathering feedback and ideas to help improve the visitor and staff experience.

Have excellent working knowledge of the Visitor Experience operational functions, and the cascading of relevant operational training to colleagues, including POS System operation, Ticketing Systems, SOPs and Service Delivery.

Maintain open lines of communication between departments, cascading relevant information including, but not exclusive to, updated exhibition messaging and object rotation, ticketing and membership offers, learning and event activity, and any other new initiatives or development opportunities.

Uphold and promote health and safety policies and procedures, ensuring the safety of all of our staff and visitors and full compliance.

Identify and suggest changes to standard operating procedures to improve efficiency and working practices.

Actively seek visitor feedback and communicate any information directly to relevant departments.

Respond to visitor enquiries as needed, and resolve any complaints in a calm, professional manner, de-escalating any potential conflicts.

Coach and mentor our team of Visitor Assistants, ensuring that they have adequate training and development opportunities so that they can confidently upsell tickets, memberships, and retail product, and consistently deliver the best possible experience for all of our visitors.

Lead on and coordinate the response to emergency situations, including but not limited to, first aid incidents, building evacuation, adverse weather and problem visitor scenarios.

Work closely with the Head of Visitor Experience and the Events Manager, to support the delivery of all events, assuming Duty Management responsibility and ensuring that all events are delivered safely, frequently working late nights and weekends to ensure the safe running and facilitation of events at the Head of Visitor Experience’s discretion.

Oversee all cash handling processes, along with the management of the banking procedures and the security of the cash room and safes, in line with insurance regulations.

Comprehensive understanding of all V&A Dundee emergency policies.

Acting as Incident Coordinator and ensuring that all Visitor Assistant colleagues are trained and understand their responsibilities of V&A Dundee’s evacuation procedure and their roles as Fire Marshalls.

Must be trained in and act as a Fire Warden & First Aider for V&A Dundee. and act as Incident Coordinator in the event of a fire or emergency evacuation.

Act as initial liaison for missing children and vulnerable adults.

Visitor Experience

Under the direction of the Head of Visitor Experience, support with the continued development of procedures and practices that promote an exceptional visitor experience, improving the efficiency of all visitor facing functions.

Promote V&A Dundee’s continued commitment to consistently delivering a world-class, 5* experience for all, identifying training opportunities and managing a learning and development matrix for the Front of House team, ensuring the visitor experience team are confident in delivering this on a daily basis.

Champion accessibility at V&A Dundee, and prioritise a welcoming and inclusive approach to all of its activities, providing feedback to relevant teams on how ongoing improvements can be made.

To be the champion and voice of the visitor at all times, and be comfortable questioning anything that doesn’t prioritise audience needs.

Ensure all elements of the Front of House and visitor-facing functions are appropriately resourced, including but not limited to, welcome and admissions, ticketing and box office, retail, gallery staffing and invigilation, visitor tours and gallery talks.

Oversee the collation of the In-Museum visitor feedback, working to resolve recurring issues and identifying trends and opportunities that support with the ongoing improvement of the visitor experience offer.

Working closely with the Head of Visitor Experience, in-house Tour Guides, and Bookings Officer, support with the ongoing development and delivery of tours and gallery talks, ensuring the commercial tour bookings are resourced and generating ideas to further enhance this offer.

Feedback on signage and wayfinding, encouraging a visitor journey that has no barriers.

Overseeing the monthly gathering of surveys and ensuring that the Visitor Experience team meet the organisation quota.

Acting as initial liaison for missing children/vulnerable persons.

Acting as the on-duty First Aider / Mental Health First Aider for visitors and staff.

Liaising and maintaining our relationships with our contract partners (SGL, Spectrum, HP).

Planning and Recruitment

This is a specific role within the Duty Management team:

Induct all new members of the visitor experience team, and ensure that they have a full grounding of the organisation and the standards required.

Work with finance, the head of visitor experience, and operations to help plan deployment for future exhibitions and events to ensure both a high quality visitor experience and that all insurance requirements are met.

Offer insight as to how proposed changes to procedures, staffing, and contracts will affect the museum floor, and create working plans on how to implement these without negatively affecting the standard of experience offered by the museum.

Arrange all necessary health and safety related training for new members of the visitor experience team.

Recruitment and induction of the Visitor Assistant team including checking right to work documentation and scheduling in shifts.

Follow the processes required for requesting new staff and advertising the role.

Creating a plan as to how many staff we may need in a round of recruitment and what hours would be required of them, whilst staying within budget.

Filtering through applications to create a shortlist.

Arranging facilities for interviews and inductions.

Monitor performance during probationary period of new starts and make recommendations on the outcome.

Overall management of Visitor Assistant rota.

Management of annual leave requests for the Visitor Assistant team.

Monitoring Visitor Assistant Team annual leave entitlement.

Managing TripAdvisor on a daily basis, looking for recurring themes and passing feedback onto relevant departments.

Responding to all TripAdvisor reviews, ensuring that a professional and yet informative tone is kept.

Keep track of staff member mentions on online reviews ad keep a log of this to be used in appraisals etc.

Work to drive V&A Dundee higher up in the rankings for Things to Do in Dundee on TripAdvisor.

Feeding back all information gathered in meetings, including the All Staff meetings.

People Management and Departmental Duties

Line management of a team of circa 10-12 Visitor Assistants, conducting annual appraisals, and behaviour and performance management.

Duty Management of a team of 30+ Visitor Assistants.

Be fluent in and engaged with V&A Dundee’s Vision and Mission, ensuring that everything done is underpinned by this, and that the Front of House team understand the part they play in the collective effort to achieve this.

Manage HR requirements of direct reports, including tracking of holiday, sickness and payroll.

Organise and distribute work tasks and schedules on shift, building rotas to ensure all areas are appropriately resourced.

Lead by example at all times, ensuring that staff are well-presented, welcoming and pro-active in their approach to their work.

Work with HR support to resolve employee issues, leading on administration and conducting meetings when required including absence management.

Perform general administrative duties as required (sending/answering emails, phone calls, filing etc.)

Prepare relevant information and attend meetings as required, including chairing the Weekly Diary Meeting in the absence of the Head of Visitor Experience.

Promote equality, diversity and inclusion in all aspects of your work, ensuring that colleagues are treated in an equitable manner with dignity and respect.

Uphold and champion V&A Dundee’s Visitor Charter / Code of Conduct and ensuring that breaches of this are addressed within the Visitor Experience departments remit.

Support on aspects of recruitment and induction within the Operations department.

Carry out any other reasonable duties as requested by the Senior Operations Management Team, and other designated senior staff.

Commercial Development

Liaise regularly with the Retail Manager and Retail team, ensuring excellent service delivery and providing staffing support when necessary.

Encouraging the maximisation of sales across all commercial platforms, and the retrieval of donations and relevant gift aid information.

Be aware of Operational KPIs across on-site ticket sales and conversion, on-site membership purchase, donations and gift aid information retrieval, retail conversion, and cascading this information to the Front of House team.

Make it a priority to have a good knowledge of our programme, and ensure that this is shared with the Front of House team, so that this can be confidently spoken about with visitors and upsold.

Identify and feedback opportunities to improve our tour and group bookings offer.

Maintain an excellent working knowledge of our catering offer and liaise regularly with our contracted catering staff, ensuring full integration with Visitor Experience team and improved visitor conversion.

Person specification
Essential

-The post requires a responsible, organised, and enthusiastic individual, with proven relevant experience, who will be committed to delivering the highest standards of service. Candidates will need to be able to demonstrate an ability to problem solve quickly and innovatively, expect the unexpected, and remain resilient when things don’t always go to plan.

-Due to the duty management responsibilities of the role and the occasional requirement to act as Out of Hours emergency response, it is essential that the successful candidate lives within 30 minutes travel time of the museum.

-Proven experience at a supervisory level or similar, in a fast-paced, customer service environment.

-Demonstrable experience of delivering exceptional customer experience.

-Experience of supervising a team on shift with multiple priorities, coordinating and leading on resourcing.

-Must be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of visitor needs, the importance of the visitor journey, and of a museum/visitor attraction environment.

-The ability to act with tact and diplomacy with a variety of stakeholders.

-Strong organisational, communication and administrative abilities.

-Proven ability to be resilient and effectively responsive to unexpected or adverse situations.

-Flexible approach to their working practice.

Desirable

-Previous work in a museum or gallery environment.

-Knowledge of First Aid at Work.

-Certificate in Health and Safety (IOSH/NCRQ or equivalent).

-Previous experience of POS Retail Systems and Ticketing Systems.

Deadline for applications: no later than 17.00, 23 May 2025. Interviews will take place week commencing 26 May 2025.

This is a full time position, working 37.5 hours per week working from our museum in Dundee on a rotational basis, Monday-Sunday, including a variety of shift timings and regular evening and weekend work, to facilitate our daily operation and exciting programme of out of hours events. Days worked will either be 4 out of 7, or 5 out of 7, depending on the length of shifts worked, and will be pre-agreed with the Head of Visitor Experience. We offer a generous package including 38 days holiday, pension scheme, company sick pay, entry to V&A Dundee paid exhibitions and many more discounts and benefits.

Application Deadline: Friday 23/05/2025