MAN3025 – Principles of Management is a 3-credit, 45-contact-hour upper-division survey of management theory and practice, and one of the most broadly required courses in Florida higher education. It is a core requirement for essentially every business major and a common requirement in health administration, hospitality, public administration, and applied technology programs.
The course is organized around the four functions of management that have structured the field since Fayol: planning (setting objectives and deciding how to reach them), organizing (structuring work, authority, and resources), leading (motivating and directing people), and controlling (measuring performance and correcting deviations). Around that frame the course builds out the history of management thought, the external environment, ethics and social responsibility, decision-making, human resource management, group and team dynamics, communication, and organizational change.
Two things distinguish it from the introductory management course numbered at the 2000 level. First, it is written for students with junior standing who have completed the business core prerequisites and can engage with organizational analysis rather than definitions. Second, it emphasizes application — cases, simulations, and team projects — over memorization of theorists.
MAN3025 is offered at approximately 23 Florida institutions and has unusually broad reach across the State University System: Florida A&M, Florida Atlantic, Florida Gulf Coast, Florida International, Florida Polytechnic, Florida State, UCF, UF, UNF, USF, and UWF all offer it, alongside state colleges awarding bachelor's degrees such as Miami Dade, Palm Beach State, Santa Fe, and Tallahassee State.
Because the course is a survey, its breadth is real but its depth is deliberately limited; specialized courses in organizational behavior, human resource management, and strategic management follow it.
MAN3025 is foundational rather than occupational — it prepares students for supervisory and managerial roles across every industry rather than for one job title.
Florida's employment base gives this course unusually broad application: hospitality and tourism management at Disney, Universal, and the hotel and cruise sector; healthcare administration at AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, and Baptist Health; logistics and distribution around Jacksonville's port and Central Florida's distribution corridor; aerospace and defense program management at the Space Coast and at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris; and a dense small-business and franchise economy statewide.
The course also supports the SHRM-CP and PHR credentials for students moving toward human resources, and provides the management foundation assumed by the PMP.
Prerequisites vary and should be verified locally. Junior standing is the most common requirement — USF, among others, requires it explicitly. State University System business schools generally also require admission to the college of business. Some institutions require introductory economics or accounting; state colleges offering the course within a B.A.S. or B.S. program often require only junior standing and program admission. A few institutions have no formal prerequisite beyond class standing.
Florida institutions also offer MAN2021, Principles of Management, at the sophomore level with substantially similar content. The two are not interchangeable for transfer: SCNS level matters, and an upper-division business program requiring MAN3025 will generally not accept MAN2021 in its place, because the 3000-level designation carries the junior-standing expectation and the upper-division credit hours a bachelor's degree requires. Students at a state college planning to transfer into a university business program should confirm which number their target program requires before enrolling — this is a recurring and avoidable articulation problem.
The course appears as Principles of Management, Management and Organization Behavior, and Management Principles across Florida catalogs. Under SCNS, the same number at the same level is equivalent regardless of local title.
MAN3025 is typically the first upper-division management course and a prerequisite for organizational behavior, human resource management, operations management, and the capstone strategic management course. Students should take it early in the junior year to avoid bottlenecking the rest of the major.
MAN3025 is an upper-division business course and does not satisfy Florida general education core requirements.
Management is being reshaped by AI on two levels at once, and the course increasingly needs to address both: AI as a tool the student uses, and AI as a phenomenon the future manager will have to govern.
AI as a management tool. Practicing managers now use AI systems for resume screening and candidate ranking, scheduling and workforce optimization, performance analytics, demand forecasting, and drafting routine communications. People analytics platforms surface attrition risk and engagement patterns. These tools genuinely compress administrative work and can surface patterns humans miss in large workforces.
Where it fails, and why managers must know. The failure modes here are not primarily technical, they are ethical and legal. Hiring algorithms trained on historical data reproduce historical discrimination — a well-documented pattern that has already produced enforcement action and litigation. An AI screening tool that disproportionately rejects candidates in a protected class exposes the employer to liability under Title VII and the ADA regardless of whether anyone intended to discriminate, and regardless of whether the vendor promised the tool was fair. Performance monitoring systems raise privacy questions and reliably damage trust when deployed without transparency. Models also cannot exercise judgment about context, fairness, or individual circumstance — precisely the judgments management exists to make.
The manager's responsibility. Accountability does not transfer to a vendor or a model. A manager who terminates an employee on an algorithm's recommendation owns that decision. This is the practical form of the ethics and social responsibility content earlier in the course, and it is worth connecting explicitly: AI governance is a management problem, involving policy, oversight, auditing, human review of consequential decisions, and honest communication with the workforce.
Academic integrity. Institutional and instructor policies govern, and they vary. Because much of this course is assessed through written case analysis — exactly the output language models generate most fluently — instructors are often specific about permitted use. The distinction that holds up: using AI to test your reasoning, find counterarguments, or improve your writing develops managerial judgment; submitting its analysis as your own does not, and the judgment is the thing employers are actually paying for.
Generated August 30, 2026 · Updated August 30, 2026