Professional Capital Services, LLC.
IT Intern | January 2017 – Present
I became the IT intern at Professional Capital Services at the beginning of 2017. Since then I have learned a great deal about the field I am pursuing as well as who I am and what I bring to the table. PCS is a very interesting company for many reasons. Founded by lawyers in 2001, they set out to provide the first transparent financial record-keeping option on the market. Sixteen years later and the firm has seen exponential growth with over $4 billion in managed assets. Under the PCS umbrella of firms includes Efficient Advisors, The Advisor Lab, and Advisor Trust. Efficient Advisors and Advisor Trust both offer advising services and investment options, while The Advisor Lab develops investment tools for all of these companies to excel. It’s only fitting that such a diverse firm has found its home in the heart of Philadelphia.
In the six or so months that I have worked for PCS a lot of things have changed, but that only seems normal here. Still a fairly young company, business stops at nothing and someone is always stoking the fire to keep things running. I was hired by the Director of IT Infrastructure and the Systems Administrator. Initially, my duties involved imaging and upgrading workstations for employees as well as a one-man IT help desk of sorts. It didn’t take long until I began absorbing more responsibilities.
Systems Administrator Role
In March, the Director of IT Infrastructure accepted a position at a different firm. He continues to offer consulting for PCS but works remotely. Shortly after that in May, the systems administrator left the company to relocate across the country. At this point, I was the sole representative of the infrastructure group and was the interim systems administrator until a replacement was found in the middle of July. This period turned out to be one of the greatest learning experiences I’ve had in my career so far. I began maintaining all of the firm’s 40 or so physical and virtual servers, two Dell SonicWall firewalls, a Mitel VoIP phone system, the Active Directory and Office 365 domains, as well as other systems that support the business functions. I also took on various tasks to improve automation on some of the servers that involved the creation of batch files. Files are received at certain times every day from banks and businesses that we do business with. The batch files I created sorted those files into the appropriate directory in order to be accessed in our financial software, FIS Relius. Seeing as the previous systems administrator left hastily, much of what I learned was trial by fire. The director of IT infrastructure had been distancing himself from the day to day responsibilities since he began working remotely. Therefore, I often had to reach out to third-party support companies, such as Mitel for the phones or Microsoft for Office 365 related questions. This is an essential skill to acquire in the IT field and something I have certainly gained from my time at PCS.
Salesforce Role
Once the new systems administrator was hired in July, I was responsible for onboarding him and making sure he had his bearings. In addition to this, I’ve began training under the current Salesforce administrator. I started out working through Trailhead modules, the Salesforce online training system. I have been handed projects as I continue getting my bearings in the organization’s CRM. One initiative that PCS has been trying to make is ensuring that all data they have is clean and well organized. We built a report along with a dashboard that displays duplicate contact records as they are created. I am responsible for weeding out those duplicates and ensuring that contacts are appropriately merged. Another function that we’ve utilised in Salesforce are the email templates. We had been using an app from Salesforce’s AppExchange, Pardot, to create these templates. We are in the process of transitioning those templates into Salesforce’s native template system. I have sorted through our old templates and determined what needs to be recreated in the new system. I will eventually be responsible for building those new templates. Another app that we have installed through the AppExchange is Conga Merge. This application merges email templates with dynamic Salesforce data. One of my responsibilities was to ensure that the PDFs were appropriately tagged in order to pull the correct data. As I continue learning and taking on more Salesforce, I hope to become a certified Salesforce administrator before I graduate Temple.
My internship with PCS has proven to be an excellent learning experience. Never before have I learned so much through trial by fire, but it surely makes for an exciting work environment. I hope to continue growing as an IT professional at this organization during my last year at Temple.