Systems Administrator

About Our Organization

At Youth Guidance, we believe that no matter what challenges a young person faces, they are more likely to succeed when they have caring adults in their lives. Our highly-trained staff guides kids to overcome the life and academic challenges facing Chicago’s youth. We meet kids where they are — physically and emotionally — to help them focus on their education, make positive choices, and remain on the right path toward life success. Founded in 1924 today Youth Guidance is a leading provider of outcomes-driven programs serving more than 8,500 youth while touching the lives of more than 14,000 youth, parents, teachers, and community members.

Position Summary

Provide end user support and assist with the management of infrastructure, perform standard maintenance, and troubleshoot to resolve problems as necessary in a fast-paced non-profit environment. Provide backup to the Director of IT to prioritize, plan, communicate and provide administrative support for all technology functions.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities:

• Primarily responsible for the selection, planning, implementation, backup/redundancy, security maintenance and enterprise deployment of applications and systems (including servers) for the agency.
• Develops and reviews policies and procedures governing compliance, maintenance, security, disaster recovery & business continuity, and risk avoidance.
• Manages small-scale, medium and enterprise level technology projects from planning to implementation and closure.
• Designs workstation builds that prioritize standardization of hardware and software compatibility across all departments and programs.
• Furnish patches, hotfixes, broadcast notices to a de-centralized organization and equips Support Team with remote management tools.
• Provides Level 2 resolution to problems escalated by the Support Team up to and including root cause analysis and change management.
• Supports offshore team to provision access to local and cloud resources in alignment with procedural guidelines.
• Assists with expansion planning and ongoing support for new programming geographies.
• Acts as a leader working closely with Evaluation and Quality Improvement (analytics) team and database administrators to label and secure data, provision access under HIPAA/FERPA framework, and to design servers and repositories that adapt to the team’s evolving needs.
• Works with webmaster to administer cloud and public-facing assets including domains, website, social media outlets and intranet.
• Oversees mobile device management including testing and deployment of operating systems and applications, as well as, endpoint protections.
• Assists in design of Identity and Access Management schema to administer access and application sets supporting the employee lifecycle from onboarding to termination.
• Participates in Risk Analysis process as a technology subject matter expert.
• Provide backup and expertise to members of Engineering Team as required.
• Maintain documentation, and orderly, up-to-date records and files using approved practices and record-keeping systems.
• Supports accreditation and compliance initiatives, as well as, budgeting process.
• Other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

Education/Experience

• A. or B.S. in a technical field or a relevant combination of education and experience.
• Experience using Microsoft Office applications, operating systems (Windows/Windows Server), and networking.
• Salesforce administrative and support experience a plus.
• Minimum of 3 years’ experience with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Hyper-V or Veeam, Microsoft Office365, Microsoft Azure
• 2 or more years’ experience with cloud-based identity management environments and SSO.
• Project management experience utilizing Waterfall or Agile methodologies
• Minimum of 3 years’ experience with installing hardware/software in a Microsoft Windows environment.
• Minimum of 3 years’ experience with Layer 2 and Layer 3 Networking and working within industry best practices.
• ITILv3/4 Foundation Certification
• Hands-on technical experience working with VPN technologies (IPSec, SSL VPN, etc.).

Skills/Abilities

• Client orientation, excellent written, verbal & presentation communication skills, and ownership & quality of work
• Leadership and demonstrated ability to effectively train audiences of varying abilities and skillsets
• Demonstrated ability to document and explain network topologies
• Ability and motivation to diagnose and troubleshoot IT issues
• General understanding of VoIP equipment
• Knowledgeable in application transport and network infrastructure protocols and possess an understanding of how to support these applications / protocols when accessed through VPN and firewall appliances
• Understanding of remote access methods and systems, firewalls, encryption, authentication and authorization technology
• Minimum of 3 years’ of IT project management

Physical Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions

• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is required to stand for sustained periods of time, frequently talk, hear, use hands and fingers to feel, handle and operate objects or controls, and occasionally stand, bend, stoop, kneel and crouch

• The employee is required to have close visual acuity to perform an activity such as: preparing and analyzing data and figures, transcribing, and viewing a computer terminal.

• The employee may occasionally lift and/or move up to 40 pounds

• Must be able to stand for an extended time

Work Environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Able to spend extended time on a computer in a workstation
• Able to work remotely when required with a stable home internet connection and private workspace conducive to video conferencing
• Some maintenance or preparation work will require atypical work hours such as nights or weekends
• Requires some travel

Core Competencies

• Communication: Uses effective written and oral communication with internal staff, teams, and community served; demonstrates empathy and listening
• Client orientation: Recognizes needs of diverse stakeholders and approaches relationships with a service orientation, to ultimately maximize the impact
• Equity mindset: Understands and is committed to goals of equity, consistently brings an equity mindset to the organization’s work and workplace
• Growth mindset: Views growth as important for personal and professional development; seeks out opportunities to expand skills, even if the change is required, demonstrates curiosity and eagerness to learn
• Ownership and quality of work: Effectively manages own work, and the work of the team to ensure delivery of high-quality work
• Supervisory skills: Effectively manages and develops others
• Mission drive: Demonstrates commitment to the missing of the organization as a whole and alignment with organization values

What Youth Guidance offers:

We offer a robust package for eligible candidates including:

• A hiring incentive of $250 for part-time and $750 for full-time
• A retention incentive of $250 after 90 days of continuous service.
• A competitive benefit package. Even though healthcare costs have gone up, we have not passed along those increases to our staff.
• If you are pursuing your social services licensure, we can help you by providing licensure test study support. Licensing test reimbursement. Assistance in attaining licensure supervision hours.

DEI Statement

At Youth Guidance, we understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are fundamental to realizing our vision of bright and successful futures for all young people. We celebrate the diversity of youth and recognize them as empowered leaders, problem-solvers, and experts of their own experiences. At the same time, we acknowledge that many systems and institutions meant to support youth are inequitable and unjust.

As such, we are committed to advancing DE&I through our words and our actions, both internally and externally, by:

• Strengthening cultural competence as well as policies, practices, and organizational structures that foster belonging and leverage the unique backgrounds and talents of staff;
• Offering youth-centered programs that are accessible and responsive to people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, language, and cultural and religious beliefs and practices;
• Influencing systems that youth, their families, and communities are impacted by, such as schools, organizational networks, governmental bodies, researchers, and the funding community, to apply approaches that embrace DEI in addressing the needs and supporting the aspirations of young people.