IT Technical Support; ARL) Supervisor

Your working location will be fully on-site, located in State College, PA. Questions related to flexible work should be directed to the hiring manager during the interview process.

We are searching for a highly motivated and self-driven IT Technical Support (ARL) – Supervisor for our highly secured environments to join our Information Technology Services Division at the Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at Penn State University. ARL’s purpose is to research and develop innovative solutions to challenging scientific, engineering, and technology problems in support of the Navy, the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Intel Community (IC).

ARL is an authorized DoD Skill Bridge partner and welcomes all transitioning military members to apply.

This role will lead frontline ITS support and Service Desk operations—overseeing student hiring/supervision, business‑hours coverage, ARL collaboration, and daily metric‑driven improvements.

• Lead and supervise an IT support team (Tier
  1): manage queues, assign/prioritize tickets, monitor SLAs, establish and maintain documentation, and provide coaching/performance feedback
• Coordinate operational governance: maintain the knowledge base/runbooks; standardize triage and escalation workflows; ensure adherence to incident/problem/change‑management policies and audit requirements
• Provide technical support and training on IT Services and end users systems; advise on computing policies and procedures for faculty, staff, and students
• Manage Service Desk performance and compliance: set KPIs/SLAs, review dashboards, publish regular reports, and drive corrective actions to improve Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and backlog
• Represent the Service Desk in IT/ARL meetings and project teams; collaborate to ensure support readiness for new services and initiatives
• Proactively monitor and report outages, changes, incidents, and problems; ensure timely, accurate communication to the Service Desk in accordance with established notification protocols
• Recruit, hire, onboard, and schedule student employees; deliver ARL-specific training (customer service, security, tools) with ongoing coaching and feedback to ensure coverage and quality support
• Own student development and performance management: conduct performance reviews; design training modules and assessments; map competency paths to support career growth within the student pipeline

• Team leadership & workforce management: proven ability to hire, schedule, coach, and evaluate Tier 1 staff and student employees
• Service desk operations & ITSM proficiency: experience with incident/problem/change management, major‑incident coordination, standardized triage, and escalation control
• Ticketing / ticket management proficiency: hands‑on experience with enterprise ticketing systems (intake, triage, assignment, workflow, SLAs), queue management, and backlog control
• Customer service excellence: strong empathy and active listening; clear written/verbal communication; ability to manage expectations, de‑escalate issues, and deliver high‑quality support for diverse user groups
• Technical troubleshooting: competence with Windows and Linux endpoints, common enterprise applications, and standard hardware/peripherals; ability to translate technical concepts for non‑technical users and deliver user‑focused training
• Knowledge management & documentation: ability to maintain KB articles, runbooks, playbooks, and standard operating procedures aligned to governance and audit needs
• Communication & stakeholder engagement: deliver timely status updates; collaborate across IT groups; effectively represent the Service Desk in meetings and project teams
• Metrics-driven improvement: define…