Flood Resilience Officer x 4 posts (Summer Internship)

Directorate: Regeneration and Environment

Temporary for 6 weeks, Full Time, 37 hours per week.

A six week, full-time paid internship gaining experience across the seven Connected by Water partners - designed for students and recent graduates.

The internship offers you the chance to be involved in meaningful work that helps deliver on building flood resilience for South Yorkshire, gain valuable experience in the workplace and to develop some of the skills, knowledge and experiences that can help you in your future career aspirations.

Water doesn’t respect local authority boundaries, and our working practices need to change so we are responding not as individual organisations but as the people best placed to make things better.

Across the partner organisations, you’ll gain experience alongside a range of teams who operate to make South Yorkshire more flood resilient. This could be practically, understanding how highways maintenance can impact our flood resilience, to how water is included in assessing planning applications, or how nature based solutions play their part in reducing flooding.

For all interns, the main purpose of the role is to gain experience of the variety of activities involved in responding to flood risk across South Yorkshire and to undertake work in their allocated department to support with the delivery of these activities and services. We will give interns with the relevant background the opportunity to work on a live problem, designing a highways drainage solution. If a feasible design is produced, we will work to move this to delivery, so you may ultimately see your design constructed to reduce flooding to a specific location. (Non engineers can still apply, we have multiple projects to work on).

Interns will also undertake learning and development activities relating to various aspects of workplace and careers skills, in order to enhance their own development and support their progress with any variety of future career or education ambitions they may have.

These internships are offered to undergraduates, and there may be the chance to develop projects with partners to form part of academic projects. If successful, we will work with you in advance of you starting the internship to understand your goals and see how we can tailor the your experience.

A chance to understand the breadth of what is involved in driving flood resilience in South Yorkshire, from community engagement to flood defences and nature based solutions.

Connected by Water is planning to offer in a full graduate programme starting in 2026, and interns will be asked to help shape this by sharing their experience and ideas at the end of the internship.

We are looking for candidates who are passionate and enthusiastic.

You don’t need to have firmly made your mind up about a career – that’s the point – never considered a role in flood resilience? This is your chance.

We are looking for someone who is organised, self-motivated, and able to work well within a team.

We want to raise awareness of how varied and interesting a career in flood resilience can be.

We know you will bring fresh insight and ideas.

This is also our first year running an internship, and we want it to form the basis of a graduate programme in future years. We will be looking for learning from the programme and your input in to how we do this.

The internship will be for six weeks, running from July 2025 to August 2025.

Up to four placements are being offered as part of the Summer Internship Scheme, hosted by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council on behalf of Connected by Water. Successful applicants will work with the different organisations which are part of Connected by Water (the four local authorities of South Yorkshire, Yorkshire Water, the Environment Agency, Mayoral Combined authority, plus work with wider stakeholders).

The list below is an example of the organisations / teams applicants will be placed on a rotational basis (two weeks with each organisation, so you will work with three).

For an informal discussion, please contact Kyle Heydon at [email protected].