Could Your Next Job Be Youth Employability Mentor at Millwall?

Millwall Community Trust is hiring a youth employability mentor, and despite the club crest at the top of the advert, the work has almost nothing to do with football. The post — listed formally as a Progression Mentor at the trust's Youth Employability Hub — went up on Millwall's official site on 13 August 2026. The base is the Lions Centre on Bolina Road, SE16.

The hub it serves is a free employment service for 16 to 24-year-olds, run alongside the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentre Plus. It draws mainly from Lewisham and Southwark, the two boroughs sitting either side of the ground, and takes referrals from further across London. The offer runs from one-to-one mentoring through to skills bootcamps, sector workshops, recruitment events and help back into training.

Here is why it matters past SE16. Roughly one in eight people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not in education, employment or training — close to a million young people, on Office for National Statistics estimates. Football club charities have quietly become one of the few doors that group will walk through voluntarily. Millwall says its employment department has more than tripled in size and scope in 18 months.

What the Job Actually Involves

The trust has not published a public duties list in an accessible format, but the shape of the hub tells you most of it. A progression mentor is the person who owns the relationship after the first appointment — the one chasing up whether someone turned up to the interview, and what happened when they did. Three strands dominate the week.

One-to-One Sessions With Young Adults

The hub's core is 1:1 employability mentoring. In practice that means CVs, interview rehearsal, benefit conditionality, travel costs, and quite often confidence work that has to happen before any of the rest lands. Millwall's own case studies talk about mental health improving alongside the job outcome, not after it. That is the honest description of the day job.

Bootcamps, Workshops and Job Fairs

The trust runs weekly pre-employability bootcamps and industry sector workshops, plus recruitment events with employers on site. Last summer it hosted DWP, Jobcentre Plus and local partners at the Lions Centre for a 16-24 hub session. A mentor is expected to fill those rooms, which means recruitment as much as delivery — empty chairs at a job fair are a mentor's problem.

Keeping the Employer Network Warm

Named partners include Runway Training, CBW Staffing Solutions, the Homewood Group, GoodPeople and Millwall FC itself. Those relationships are the difference between advice and an actual vacancy. Whoever takes this post inherits a live list and is judged on whether it grows.

Why Millwall Wants Another Youth Employability Mentor

Growth, mostly. A department that has tripled in scope in a year and a half either adds staff or starts turning people away. The existing team includes John Scarborough as education and employability manager, with Ophelie Zahui working as an employability mentor across the hub and the training ground, and Ade Jiboye as youth employment coach. This is reinforcement, not replacement.

From Job Fair to Groundsman at The Den

The clearest illustration the trust has published is Maslah Abdi. Unemployed and, by his own account, discouraged, he was referred to a security job fair by Jiboye, picked up a security officer role at Millwall FC, then moved to a full-time groundsman job at the club on 19 March 2025. Two steps, both inside the same building.

I absolutely love it here at Millwall FC as a groundsmen. I'm using the energy he gave me everyday.

In June 2026 the EFL reported hub mentees spending a day at The Den. That is the softer half of the model — the stadium is the hook that gets a disengaged 19-year-old to a first appointment, and the mentoring is what happens once they are through the turnstile.

Who Should Actually Apply

Not coaches. The useful background here is youth work, careers guidance, IAG, Jobcentre work programmes, or frontline charity delivery in London. Familiarity with south London referral routes is worth more than a football CV. If you have run a caseload and been held to progression targets, you already know this job.

• Caseload management and outcome recording, not just session delivery
• Enhanced DBS clearance and safeguarding training for under-18s
• Comfort working with DWP paperwork and funder reporting
• Evening and matchday flexibility, given where the hub sits

What to Check Before You Send Anything

The published notice did not carry salary, hours, contract length or a closing date in any form we could verify, so treat none of those as known. Ask for the full job description and the funding end date before you commit — employability posts in the charity sector are frequently tied to a specific grant, and a two-year contract is a different life decision from a permanent one.

If you want it, go straight to Millwall Community Trust's recruitment contact rather than a job board aggregator, since the aggregated copies of this vacancy are already drifting from the original. Ask what the caseload size is, who sets the progression targets, and whether the role is grant-funded. Then watch the trust's news feed — it posts its hub events publicly, and turning up to one is a better read on the work than any advert.