Inside Temple University Fox Leadership Development Program

About the School

Philadelphia’s Temple University serves over 7,000 undergraduates at the Fox School of Business. The school has developed an undergraduate professional development program called Fox Leadership Development Program (FLDP) to engage students and better prepare them for their futures after graduation.

Challenge before Suitable

With such a large population, Fox School of Business needed a more scalable way to integrate their outside the classroom activities. Previously the school had a professional development program called “Immersion” where students could attend events. They found that paper sign-in sheets were unorganized and overwhelming so they were seeking a way to streamline the experience for students while also solving data collection headaches as an administration.

Life with Suitable

Suitable’s team worked closely with the Fox School of Business to identify a set of Core Competencies that align with the school’s unique mission and vision. As more university recruiters are starting to adopt competency recruiting models, the communication of these to the students will help them to think and speak in the language of the companies that will eventually hire them. When students engage with activities in the FLDP program it leads to development. The game-like levels within Suitable’s platform incentivizes students to complete the program and go beyond the bare minimum. Suitable worked with internal departments at Fox to develop unique badges for various sets of students so that students have something personalized to work towards.

As opposed to their previous inconvenient paper sign in sheets, Fox administrations can now get real time data analysis at the click of a button. 

Fox School administrators find that Suitable has been a great way to get and keep their students involved all throughout their time at Fox. Fox students find the mobile app useful even starting freshman year. It helps freshmen navigate their first year and meet the 250 point requirement. The event code gives them the ability to see students’ attendance in real-time so they are better able to accommodate space based on the number of attendees at meetings. As far the upperclassmen they have found switching to FLDP from Immersion to be a seamless transition with Suitable’s intuitive platform. 

Students have also found themselves relying on Suitable to manage their student organizations more effectively. Suitable’s Student Organization management capabilities equip students and student leaders with the tools they need to manage themselves.

Outcomes Achieved

The automated attendance tracking of Suitable has been able to show Fox exactly how their students are progressing. In Fall 2017, 3,024 students completed FLDP activities, of which 952 were freshmen and 2,072 sophomores, juniors, and seniors participated in FLDP even though the program was not a requirement for them which shows how quickly students start adopting the technology. Also, over 300 student activity requests submitted through the app. Fox would have otherwise failed to track these 300 activities and their associated attendance data. 

Fox School of Business did not want their students to feel like they were limited to only events so Fox leveraged Suitable’s form building capabilities to offer various quizzes, assessments, and surveys to students so they could self-report experiences they were having off campus. These self-reported entries still award points toward completion of FLDP, which awarded over half a million points to students in only one semester.

Plans for the Future

In the future, Fox School of Business plans to do more strategic outreach with students and partner more with employers so they can  better align FLDP with employer expectations. Employers and students will be able to interact on the Suitable platform to see if they are a good fit for each other. Fox also wants to utilize the co-curricular data to better analyze, predict, and improve retention and persistence outcomes. Suitable provides insights on how they can help students successfully navigate Fox and graduate with a desirable skill set that they would not necessarily get from a class. Student organizations can continue to utilize the Suitable platform to advertise their attendance rates in an easy way and even collect end of the year data. Future plans are enhanced through Suitable’s technology offerings so rather than future plans being complicated, they are simply planning to leverage Suitable in more ways.