Academic rigor

John Meyer is one of the few business school deans who is as comfortable in the classroom as he is inside an auto-repair shop.

Meyer, the dean of the school of business and technology at Florida SouthWestern State College in Fort Myers, is a certified auto mechanic who owned his own towing, repair and auto wholesale business before earning his academic stripes. “I'm a nontraditional student,” Meyer explains. “I went back to college in my middle 30s.”

That makes Meyer the ideal academic to bridge the yawning gap between universities and the real world. “This is why I like workforce education,” he says. “How do you get these things aligned?”

As the Southwest Florida economy recovers from the devastating recession, training the next generation of employees will be critical. Meyer teamed with colleagues Gary Jackson from Florida Gulf Coast University and Aysegul Timur from Hodges University to evaluate what skills employers in Southwest Florida might need in the future.

Surprisingly few universities have studied the labor markets in their own backyards with any academic rigor. But the trio from Southwest Florida plans to publish at least one of their papers in a peer-reviewed academic journal. In fact, Meyer was invited to speak at the National Council for Workforce Education annual conference in Pittsburgh late last year to discuss the effort.

Generally, academia responds to anecdotal evidence of a need for particular skills. Not so here: “We view ourselves as real, honest-to-goodness researchers,” Meyer says.

Already, their findings have led to the creation of certain programs. For example, Hodges instituted a business-analyst degree as a result of their work.

But the labor-market research by Meyer and his colleagues will form the basis for more comprehensive link between what the universities in the Fort Myers area can provide and what employers need, especially in areas such as information technology and health care. “We need access to data that gives us predictability,” Meyer says.

Read the research papers on the business school's website at: fsw.edu/sobt.