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Senior Consultant - Information Technology
Quantitative Research Scientist
About Gibson Consulting Group
Gibson Consulting Group, Inc. is a privately-held and nationally recognized education consulting and research firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1998, we have decades of experience working with school districts of all sizes, state education agencies, and other educational organizations in Texas and in 30 other states.
Our mission is to “Better the lives of students by providing exemplary educational consulting and research services that make education systems more efficient and effective.”. We work to accomplish this mission through a unique blend of competencies including program evaluation, educational research, surveys, internal audit, process re-engineering, and efficiency review services to our clients.
Team Profile
Gibson’s research team is a small group of passionate and intellectually curious researchers. We conduct policy-relevant research at the district, state, and federal levels, exploring education research questions informed by some of the most challenging problems confronting educators, researchers, and policymakers today. We are looking to grow our team with a Quantitative Research Scientist who shares our energy and enthusiasm for tackling complex problems in education research and is looking for a collaborative environment with opportunities to support various research projects across multiple project teams. We are searching for candidates who are interested in public education, education research, evaluation of education programs, and learning about improving the way schools operate.
Position Summary
This position will be responsible for conducting education research and evaluating education programs for school districts, states, regional service centers, education research centers, and other public and private organizations. The position will primarily, but not exclusively, support the quantitative work within the research and evaluation portfolio.
Essential Functions
Managing, cleaning, and analyzing large-scale educational datasets, including:
Executing all data management and statistical analysis in an explicit and reproducible fashion using annotated and documented scripts.
Writing efficient and robust code for data preparation, analysis, and reporting (including looping and working with macros).
Assembling panel data, conducting quality control checks, producing descriptive statistics, and selecting and fitting appropriate statistical models.
Communicating results of statistical analyses through written reports, presentations, briefings, customized static scorecards, interactive dashboards, and other medium for dissemination.
Designing evaluation frameworks that measure the impact of programs on interim and long-term outcomes.
Providing statistical consulting to clients regarding the appropriate use of existing data.
Contributing expertise to the development of evaluation or research proposals in response to competitive Request for Proposals or grant funding opportunities issued by school districts, state education agencies, the federal government, and private foundations.
Supporting large-scale multi-site data collection (district administrative data, student/staff/parent survey data). This includes writing scripts to efficiently import, check, clean, and standardize often messy and incomplete data from numerous districts, colleges, or universities. These scripts should be easy to update with new and corrected data and clearly document coding decisions and reasoning.
Developing, and aligning, research protocols, including surveys, and interview and focus group guides.
Required Qualifications
Advanced Stata programming skills (R will be considered and experience with Python is a plus).
Experience managing and cleaning large, complex datasets (candidates will be required to provide sample scripts).
Experience through coursework or applied research projects with statistical and econometric methods commonly used in social science research.
Familiarity with the principles of sound research design.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience in the education sector.
Experience with quasi-experimental methods for observational data.
A passion for data management and preparation as well as the belief that each new data management project is an opportunity to write better code and learn something new.
Experience automating the production of reports from a statistical program, especially LaTeX or HTML.
Experience building interactive dashboards using tools such as Shiny or Dash.
Experience translating complex statistical concepts and research findings into understandable and meaningful results.
Desired Education
The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. or graduate training in a social science field, such as educational psychology, political science, psychology, economics, sociology, or human development. Relevant experience can substitute for advanced educational credentials.
Employment Conditions, Expectations, and Assurances
This exempt full-time position will require 40 hours of work per week, usually Monday through Friday. This position requires that the incumbent sit or stand for extended periods of time while working on a computer. The ability to travel occasionally is required. This is a fully remote position. Flexible hours and work schedules will be considered after an individual establishes a track record of strong performance.
Gibson is headquartered in Austin, Texas and offers a competitive salary, opportunities for performance bonuses, generous vacation and personal leave, retirement benefits that include 401(k) matching, and employer contributions to health and life insurance. All employment with Gibson is at-will.
The salary range for this position is $100,000 - $120,000 and will be commensurate with the candidate’s experience and expertise.
Gibson Consulting Group, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. To learn more about us, please visit www.gibsonconsult.com.
Please complete this form to apply: https://gibson.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_efgEDmgKzKRVhn8.
In it you will be asked to enter some contact information, answer two methods questions, and upload your cover letter, resume, and a syntax sample.
Senior Consultant - Information Technology
About Gibson Consulting Group
Gibson Consulting Group Inc. is a privately-held and nationally recognized education consulting and research firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1998, we have decades of experience working with school districts of all sizes, state education agencies, and other educational organizations in Texas and in 30 other states. Our mission is to better the lives of students by providing exemplary educational consulting and research services that make education systems more efficient and effective. We work to accomplish this mission through a wide range of services, including performance audits, technology reviews, program evaluation, process re-engineering, cost savings, educational research, and other data analysis services to our clients.
Position Summary
Gibson is seeking an experienced Information Technology (IT) Consultant to support the firm's education consulting practice. The IT Senior Consultant will lead and perform consulting activities for school districts and educational agencies throughout the US. Primary responsibilities include performing IT and data compliance audits, and developing recommendations and implementation strategies for clients' technology functions. Additional duties involve data analysis, data visualization, client interviews, report writing, and delivering client presentations. The IT Consultant will contribute to Gibson's knowledge management strategy through internal meetings, presentations, and sharing relevant research/news. This position will report directly to the Executive Director of Consulting.
Essential Functions
Conduct reviews and audits of client technology functions and departments to assess needs, identify gaps and risks, and provide recommendations and implementation strategies to address them. Review and audit topics include IT organization, IT general controls, IT frameworks, cybersecurity, cloud operations, data governance and privacy, management information systems and applications, development life cycles, disaster recovery, device management, help desk operations, IT staffing and cost analysis, emerging technologies, and network operations.
Develop insightful, visually compelling, and engaging data dashboards that support client decision-making.
Transform and synthesize large data sets from multiple sources to identify the story behind the data and support consultants' and clients' reporting needs.
Conduct client interviews and focus groups with client senior leadership, staff, and stakeholders.
Develop project findings that are well-supported through analysis of data and/or identifying gaps in meeting expected standards.
Analyze business functions to identify process inefficiencies; develops process flow charts using Microsoft Visio to illustrate inefficiencies and recommendations.
Formulate thoughtful, impactful, and actionable recommendations.
Write well-organized reports with data tables, graphics, and effective communication of results
Assist with data integration and ETL processes.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Accounting, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related discipline.
Graduate or post-graduate course work in data analysis.
Two to five years' experience performing and supervising IT Audits, Technology Risk Assessments, or IT internal control risk evaluation and reporting.
Experience with data visualization and analytics tools (Power BI, MicroStrategy), and advanced Excel skills.
Demonstrated ability to independently lead consulting engagements.
Strong analytical, communication, and organizational skills.
Preferred Qualifications
Current certificate or commitment to obtain within two years: CISA, CISSP or similar
Familiarity with information security frameworks (COBIT, CSI, NIST, ISO, etc.)
T-SQL experience developing queries, joins, creating/maintaining stored procedures
Experience with cloud platforms/technologies (AWS, Azure, etc.)
Experience working with school districts or public‑sector financial operations.
Demonstrated initiative and ability to work both independently and collaboratively within a project team environment.
High proficiency with the suite of Microsoft applications (Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Visio).
Employment Conditions, Expectations, and Assurances
This exempt full-time position will require 40 hours of work per week, usually Monday through Friday. Flexible hours and work schedules will be considered after an individual establishes a track record of strong performance. This position requires that the incumbent sit or stand for extended periods of time while working on a computer. The ability to travel occasionally (15 to 20 percent) is required.
Candidates may work remotely from anywhere in the United States. Gibson offers a competitive salary, opportunities for performance bonuses, generous vacation and personal leave, retirement benefits that include 401(k) matching, and employer contributions to health and life insurance. All employment with Gibson is at-will. The salary range for this position is $120,000 to $130,000 and is commensurate with the candidate’s experience.
Gibson Consulting Group, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer.