You will learn how financial information can be used to assist managers and external user groups in their decision-making processes. You will initially look at the informational needs of outside user groups, the nature of the information they are provided with, and how this information can be analysed and interpreted in order to enhance the effectiveness of their decision making.

Topic areas will include:

• The reporting frameworks and ethical principles that underpin financial reporting
• The nature of international financial reporting standards
• Format and content of the statement of profit or loss and statement of financial position
• The statement of cash flows
• Analysis and interpretation of financial statements using ratio analysis

You will then examine how financial information can facilitate managers in making operational decisions in relation to planning and control.

Topic areas will include:

• Costing (full and variable costing)
• Cost, volume, profit analysis
• Relevant costs for decision making
• Budgeting and variance analysis
• Balance scorecards
• Working capital management

Finally, you will explore the motivations for entrepreneurial activity and techniques that can be used to appraise investment decisions.

Topic areas will include:

• Investment appraisal techniques (payback, accounting rate of return, net present value and internal rate of return)
• Practical aspects of investment appraisal (inflation and capital rationing)
• Risk and uncertainty

In this module, you will develop the knowledge and skills in applying a variety of quantitative data analysis techniques to support business decision making. You will be introduced to business modelling using appropriate analytical tools, and your learning will cover a range of techniques to help business forecasting and data presentation.
In this module you will be exposed to a range of data analysis tools and skills, including:

• Business Analysis and Modelling: management of complex and varied data sets; building spreadsheet models.
• Data Trends and Associations e.g. identifying relationships between business variables.
• Business Forecasting and Predictive Modelling – analysing factors and trends for business planning.
• Business and Dashboard reporting – consolidation, interpretation and presentation of data for professional output.
• Data distribution, data presentation and using summary statistics – handling a range of data for statistical analysis.
• Gaining an understanding of the overlap between business and research data and the selection of appropriate tools for management of both types of data.

Working with these analysis tools, you will learn to develop confidence in dealing with a wide range of data sets. You will become familiar with the role of modelling as an aid to problem solving and will build skills which enable you to interpret data and present your findings to a range of audiences. Very importantly, you will gain a good understanding of the crucial role that analysis of data and interpretation of results plays in the decision-making arena.

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.

Your programme aims to ensure that you are learners for business, not just of business, upon graduation. This module starts you on this journey by supporting your professional development. It aims to increase your awareness of and sensitivity to personal and employability/entrepreneurship/enterprise skills. It does this by focusing on programme-specific graduate career opportunities that require you to work on projects similar to those that graduates within your field will undertake once in employment. You are taking an experiential, team-focussed, project/problem-based approach. The module will support you in identifying and developing the essential skills, behaviours, and understanding required to sustainably and responsibly manage organisations and their people. These might include generic areas such as leadership, project management, management, resilience, empathy and professional judgment, and discipline-specific capabilities.
You will use this understanding to evaluate, practise, develop and re-evaluate your capabilities in these skills, behaviours and acumen areas, enabling you to build your own graduate identity. This approach underpins your successful future employability, entrepreneurship or enterprise activity. In addition, the activities provide you with authentic insights into the importance and challenges of team-working within organisations as you work to address real organisations’ issues.
Learner/team-led, tutor-guided sessions aim to support you in enhancing your employability and upon building your graduate identity. During the practical development of the key attributes and behaviours central to your future success within your chosen profession within a project-based environment, you will receive support from the programme team. In addition, by documenting and reflecting upon your progress towards achieving your own team defined KPIs, you will enhance your skills, behaviours, capabilities, and understanding.
In short, at the end of this module, you will:
• Have an understanding and increased awareness of, and sensitivity to, those personal skills and attributes which are central to your future employability in your chosen profession or future entrepreneurial or enterprise activity
• Be better prepared to understand the skills and qualities required by graduates in your field to secure future employment or engage in enterprise activity
Have practical experience of working on a real-life business project appropriate to your programme area, improving your project management, research, employability and collaboration skills

Governments and society are increasingly expecting business organisations to step up and assist in building cohesive societies through the application of more sustainable forms of capitalism. This module introduces you to the global economic, societal, technological and environmental challenges of the 21st century, and identifies how, through greater alignment of business interest with that of society and the economy, business can be a “force for good” as well as best prepared to ‘Take on Tomorrow’. You will focus on how contemporary businesses, broadly defined to include public, voluntary, not-for-profit and social enterprise, interact the economy and society though examination of topical news stories and events. In doing so, you will develop a deep understanding of the relationships between business, the economy and society and the global challenges we all face. You will explore a range of cultural, governmental and ethical issues that arise from current and developing global and national contexts through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Key issues include business ethics, the role of business in society, green issues, stakeholder theory, capitalist variants, the nature of globalisation at firm, economic and societal level and the interrelationship between business and government. By the end of the module you will be able to evidence critical thinking and analysis skills while bringing your own experiences as a citizen into your discussion and inquiry.

This module examines the foundations of organisations, their management and their people through which you will develop understanding of how people and work are organised; principles that underpin all business programmes. Organisational behaviours are interdependent, and this requires us to look at ongoing relationships – of both co-operation and conflict – between organisational functions, whether finance, marketing, HR, as well as the broader context and external environment.

Employers seek out graduates that have the knowledge and skills to transform organisation in the face of continuous, rapid economic, environmental and social change. Therefore, this module will develop your understanding of how organisational sustainability and team performance might be enhanced through your heightened awareness of people’s workplace behaviour, actions and attitudes.

We will examine aspects at the organisation and work level (macro-level) such as:
• Changing nature of work, of employment and of organisations
• Ethics, power and control
And at the team and individual level (micro-level), such as:
• Leading effective teams
• Difference and diversity
• Motivation, commitment and engagement

As we examine these aspects you will be introduced to a range of concepts, theories, models and subject knowledge and will apply these through a problem-solving approach, in a practical discipline-specific context using case studies, reflection upon personal understanding and experience and real organisation examples.

Throughout, you will be encouraged to adopt a critical perspective – to analyse and challenge what you read and hear. You will consider whose interests are served by conventional ways of understanding organisations, to become more aware of your own bias – perhaps causing you to re-think or your preconceived assumptions and beliefs.

This module will introduce you to the business philosophy and practice of marketing. It will examine how organisations can analyse and segment markets to improve performance and profitability by building long-term relationships with their customers. A wide range of marketing decisions is studied together with the influence of the changing marketing environment on these decisions.

Main lectures will introduce the basic theories of marketing:
• The Marketing Environment
• Consumer & Organisational Behaviour
• Target Marketing & Segmentation.
• Marketing Information Systems & Research.
• Dimensions of a Product, Branding and Product Life Cycle.
• Pricing Theory; strategies and tactics.
• The Promotional Mix: Advertising, PR, Direct & e-Marketing.
• Marketing channels

Whilst seminars and topical lectures will apply marketing theory to different case scenarios:
• Service Marketing
• Not for profit Marketing
• Food marketing
• Digital Marketing
• Environmental Marketing
• Sustainable Marketing