Michael Weber, Dean of the Barney Barnett School of Business and Free Enterprise, Florida Southern College

August 2026 —Invest: sat down with Michael Weber, dean of the Barney Barnett School of Business and Free Enterprise at Florida Southern College, to discuss how the school is aligning curriculum with employer demand in a fast-changing economy. “The business community keeps asking for very specific day-one skills, and we pay close attention to that,” Weber said.

What key changes over the past year have most impacted the School of Business, and in what ways?

The biggest change has been the integration of AI into the curriculum, and it is not just about how to use AI as a student. We are focused on how to use AI in business decision-making so graduates enter the workforce ready to apply it responsibly and strategically.

We want our students, when they graduate, to be engineers of AI in the sense that they know how to work with it, shape it, and guide it toward business outcomes. In the fall, we offered a course called Business Applications of AI. Faculty from each business discipline came in and discussed how AI is being used in that discipline, and students completed multiple hands-on activities centered on using AI.

At the culmination of the class, students received a certificate in AI prompt engineering. Those types of skill sets, certificates, and stackable credentials are real differentiators in the job market today. Employers are telling us their current employees can be resistant to fully engaging with AI to its greatest extent, so when they are looking to hire new employees, they want those new employees to have skills in AI and not have fear of AI.

We want students to understand how to use AI in a collaborative way for decision-making. And if the market debate is that traditional entry-level jobs are being taken over by AI, then we want our students positioned above that initial level, with the ability to manage the tools rather than compete with them. We want our students to be above that initial level so that they’re actually managing whatever AI bots are doing, and they should come into the workforce with those skills already.

Apart from AI, what recent initiatives or program developments stand out as especially impactful for students and the broader business community?

The business community keeps asking for very specific day-one skills, and we pay close attention to that. One area is project management. Employers want graduates who can step into a team and contribute immediately, so we have been integrating a project management course into more majors so it becomes a required course.

Another area is Lean Six Sigma. It is not a new topic, but organizations remain very interested in that kind of process and improvement framework.

A third area is foundational technical capability. We want students to have strong skills in the Microsoft Office suite, and that starts with Excel. It sounds simple, but employers notice the difference between someone who can say they know Excel and someone who can actually use it appropriately.

From there, we want students to move into tools that support analytics and decision-making, such as Power BI. And when we talk about analytics, we want students to have practical competence, not just familiarity. They need to know how to use R, use Python, and understand SQL. You cannot just say you know the word. You actually have to be able to use it.

How is the school forming partnerships to meet workforce needs in Tampa Bay and the broader region?

I will answer that from the perspective of our fastest-growing major, which is finance. Finance is growing unbelievably fast, and part of that is because of our partnerships with local firms, national firms, and international firms. Those partnerships range from investment firms to wealth management firms to corporate banking, and they are scooping up students as fast as we can graduate them.

I imagine this is a growing area nationwide, but in our region it is intensified by what is happening in the I-4 corridor. Wealth is moving in, wealth is being generated, and demand grows with it. Even in Polk County, where we are, there are 85 people moving to Polk County every day. People do not move unless they have the resources to move, so you see wealth at different levels coming in and a rapidly expanding base that needs financial expertise.

Hillsborough County and Pinellas County will describe similar trends. The advantage Polk County has is that we have more land available for development, and we sit in the center of a distribution network that continues to grow.

A real estate minor attached to the finance degree is also very popular. We recently became designated as a CCIM-affiliated university. The CCIM designation is widely regarded as a top professional designation among commercial real estate professionals, and with that affiliation we are attracting more interest and building even stronger partnerships in commercial real estate, from development to management to sales.

We continue to leverage partnerships in supply chain as well, including relationships tied to large distribution centers. We work with partners such as Saddle Creek, and we pay close attention to the logistics activity that shapes the region. The airport here in Lakeland is the third-largest cargo airport in the state of Florida, behind Miami-Dade and Jacksonville, and that cargo activity supports a broader ecosystem of business demand and opportunity.

In a fast-growing region, what challenges are top of mind for business education today?

One of the biggest challenges is preparing students to work in a global business environment that has become less predictable. The challenge is operating as normally as you can while navigating unknown variables that seem more prevalent today, whether they are geopolitical or economic.

From a business education perspective, we have to help students think through uncertainty in a structured way. They need to learn how to make decisions when the range of outcomes is wider, and when conditions can shift quickly.

Tariffs are a useful example. If a tariff is designed to bring manufacturing back to the United States, that is a policy lever. But building a manufacturing facility might take as much as five years, and the tariff might be gone in two years. So how do you do the ROI analysis? How do you evaluate an investment when the variables can change faster than the outcome can be achieved?

That is the core challenge: the variables are changing faster than major projects can launch and mature. Students need to learn how to evaluate decisions in that environment and adapt as inputs change. It is operating in a state of a little bit of chaos, but the basic market principles are still there. The key is knowing how to navigate them.

Looking ahead, what are your key goals and priorities for the next two to three years?

For us, it always comes back to outcomes. No matter what we are doing, I want to make sure we continue to hit our outstanding metrics of employment. In the last four years, we have either hit 100% or 98.6% employment or graduate school placement for our graduates.

That is our primary focus because it is the best ROI on a student’s investment of money and time. We do that through outstanding curriculum, faculty who are committed to excellence, and students who come to us motivated and ready to achieve.

Those outcomes strengthen our brand, which then supports our ability to recruit the next best student. It becomes a positive cycle. So our priorities remain consistent: continue to focus on the student, continue to focus on outcomes, and ensure the number one outcome stays strong, which is employment.