Hawaii State Department of Education
Overview
As an HR Assistant V in the Recruiting and Employment Services branch of the Hawaii State Department of Education, I worked primarily in the administrative IT unit — supporting the branch’s core employment systems and maintaining data integrity across server upgrades.
NEOED System Administration
A significant portion of my role involved working within NEOED, the DOE’s applicant tracking and employment management platform. Responsibilities included:
- Reassigning and managing user permissions across staff and contractor accounts
- Overriding system-level issues to unblock HR processing workflows
- Assisting with the processing and maintenance of employment records
- Supporting end users across the branch with system navigation and troubleshooting
Server Upgrades & Data Migration
I assisted with the upgrade of employment records servers from legacy versions to current systems, which involved both data migration and system consolidation across servers. This included verifying data integrity through the migration process and supporting the branch’s transition to updated infrastructure.
Python Compliance Screening
At the direction of the IT director, I contributed to an exploratory project to automate compliance screening — cross-referencing employees and contractors against harmful individuals lists and generating a report for HR review. The project was early-stage and did not advance into a formal pipeline, but gave me practical experience applying Python in a real institutional setting.
Takeaways
Working inside a government HR system gave me exposure to production environments where data accuracy and access control carry real consequences. Navigating a large institutional system like NEOED — and contributing to server migrations affecting active employment records — reinforced the importance of careful, methodical work in high-stakes data environments.