The Opportunity

Salary: £38,686 - £41,511 per annum, inclusive of 2024/2025 pay award Working Pattern: Full-time, 37 hours per week

Location: Your office base will be County Hall, Chichester and a typical week will combine homeworking with attendance at the office. This is led by the needs of the service.

We're looking for a finance professional who is part professionally qualified, with experience to deliver a full range of high quality financial management and accountancy services to clients. As Senior Finance Officer, you will support the team with your strong technical and analytical skills, to provide financial insight and advice on large complex budgets. You will support the team to advise and influence the service to make informed financial decisions, which will have a direct impact on service delivery.

The role will involve working with Adult Social Care budgets. The service is experiencing a period of unprecedented change, where people are living longer resulting in significant growth in demand for social care services. Since we want to make sure West Sussex is a great place to live, the County Council recognises this challenge and has an ambitious improvement programme. At the heart of this is an aim to promote independence by enabling people to stay healthier and live in their homes and communities for longer. Linking financial data with performance information, and with a naturally enquiring mind, you will play an essential role in supporting the service to build a sustainable model for delivering adult social care services.

If you are looking for a diverse and exciting role which offers you the opportunity to utilise your technical skills, build collaborative relationships with the service and support the team more widely to add value, then we would like to hear from you.

As well as adding real value to our service users and our communities, as an employer we recognise our employees are central in being able to achieve this. To recognise this we want to help support your development and provide an great place to work ensuring you can fulfil your full potential, have access to a range of benefits including:

• an excellent local government pension scheme, employers pension contribution at 19.70%
• generous holiday entitlement of 27days plus bank holidays and opportunity to buy additional leave
• a range of flexible working options, depending on your job role
• maternity, paternity, dependency and adoption leave
• volunteering opportunities
• training and development opportunities, including coaching and mentoring
• a range of discounts giving our staff access to hundreds of offers; groceries, travel, cinema tickets, days out, leisure activities, high street retailers and the opportunity to save over £1,000 a year through our West Sussex Choices benefits platform (see our Staff discounts page if you are a business looking to offer a discount)
• health and wellbeing benefits including access to our Employee Assistance Programme, Mental Health First Aiders and Voluntary Health Cash Plans

For a full list this can be found at our Rewards and Benefits page.

Further information

The reference number for this role is CRS00880.

For an informal conversation or for further information regarding the role, please contact Laura Hardie at with the relevant reference number above. For issues or queries regarding your application please contact .

To apply, upload your CV and complete the application explaining the skills and experience you can bring to the role, with reference to above and ensuring that any gaps in employment are covered in your CV. Please ensure you have saved the job description attached to the main advert on our website as, once the job has closed, you may not have the opportunity to download again.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable adults. This post is subject to 3 years referencing and a health check.

Equity, inclusion and accessibility is very important to West Sussex County Council. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, as this helps us build a diverse and talented workforce, that reflects the communities we serve. We ensure our approach to recruitment is flexible and supportive to enable all applicants to be at their best and to ensure they have the best possible chance of success.

We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants that have a disability, are a veteran or are a care leaver. More information can be found on our application help page.

Note for Recruitment Agencies: We prefer to hire people directly, but we do have a supplier list for when we need a helping hand. We'll be in touch directly if we need you!