Business and Management Foundation Year

Your learning is achieved via a combination of weekly workshops, seminars and fortnightly group and/or individual tutorials. The aim of all sessions is to create a friendly, interactive and inclusive learning environment. Indicative topics include (but are not limited to):
• Researching and referencing reliable sources of information
• How to thinking critically and analytically
• Time management for professional development
• Presentation skills – visual, verbal and written
• Team work – how to work with and influence others
• Professional skills in business leadership and management
• Introduction to Emotional Intelligence
• Introduction to Career Planning

How are business organisation organised in order to deliver on their strategic mission and prosper in an increasingly competitive globalised environment? This module is designed to develop your understanding of business practice and the key strategic concerns of senior managers. In doing, this module will provide through the exploration of the functions of a business, the foundation for your later career as a manager.

Contemporary business operations are dependent on the efficient and effective application of certain key functions, namely Strategy, Marketing, and Human Resource Management. You will explore how each contributes to organisational performance, as well as how these all are inter-related and mutually dependent. In your study of Strategy, you will explore the idea of strategic positioning and choice, which is so important for businesses in setting out their intended direction of travel. In your study of Human Resource and Management you will think about what human capital means and what are competencies. In your exploration of marketing, you will consider how businesses engage in market segmentation and promotional strategies. These activities may appear very different but in reality, these all contribute to the business as a whole.

In this module you will be assessed by the submission of Professional Report. You will be guided on how to construct the report in lectures and seminars.

In this module, you will learn about the practical challenges faced by organisations in creating business information and communicating this information in an understandable way. You will learn about business data, its key sources and how this can be created for specific project purposes through survey design and associated data collection. You will learn how to undertake primary data collection in an ethically appropriate way and how to handle, prepare and analyse your data using analytical tools e.g. Excel. The importance of communication to your business audience is reinforced through verbal and written presentation of your study findings.

Within this module, you will cover the following topics:
• Introduction to Business Information.
• Data and Information Management: sources; types; storage; accessibility.
• Data Collection: survey design and distribution, taking account of the different types of data we might want to collect.
• Ethical aspects of data collection.
• Data Preparation - extracting and importing data to analytical tools e.g. Excel; preparing data for analysis.
• Data Analysis and Presentation with analytical tools: converting data into business information and intelligence.
• Communicating the Information and Intelligence – using reports and presentations.

As an integral part of your learning, you will use “real” data, which you will subsequently learn to manage, prepare and analyse. You will learn how to present your work in verbal and written formats, leading to the development of a 2,000 word individual report for your summative assessment.

This module examines how our business organisations are organised in order to deliver on their strategic mission in an increasingly competitive globalised environment. This module is designed to develop your understanding of business practice and the key strategic concerns of senior managers. This module will provide, through the exploration of the functions of a business, the foundation for your later career as a manager.

In this module you will be assessed by a Project that involves a presentation and a project whilst working in a team. You will be guided on how to approach this examination in lectures and seminars.

Your learning is achieved via a series of coherent lectures & seminars. The aim is to create a friendly, highly interactive and inclusive learning environment including a range of diverse learning activities. Indicative topics include (but are not limited to):

• Sustainability Literacy
• Global Environmental Issues
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Business and Society
• Contemporary Business Issues
• Introduction to Business Ethics
• Responsible Business Models
• Sustainable Business Theories
• Sustainable Business Innovation

In addition to knowledge generation this approach will enable you to further develop transferable skills essential for success at both university and in the world of work: personal confidence, teamwork & collaboration, self-management and independent learning. You will be assessed through a combination of debates/presentations and coursework, which will equip you with the transferable skills required for your programme and future employment. Above all, this module will stimulate your curiosity as to how business can be a force for good in making the world a better place.

How are businesses organised and who is responsible for this? How do both leaders and managers contribute in their own way to the collective performance of a business organisation?

In particular, the functions of management are to: Set objectives/targets for individuals, teams and larger work units; make day-to-day decisions, especially in relation to staff recruitment, costing projects and budgeting for the future; reviewing individual and collective performance and planning for the future.

For leaders, you will explore how their role is primarily concerned with changing the emotional state of colleagues through inspiration, concern and authentic commitment. You will also consider how poor leadership is manifested and study examples of how poor leadership impacts on others and the wider organisation. You will gain an understanding of differing views of leadership and what models (Transactional; Transformational, Authentic, Distributed) have been put forward to explain its practice in the real world.

As a result of studying this module, you will have a foundation for later study in your undergraduate degree and understand the benefits of effective leadership and management for business organisations.