Postgraduate Certificate in Business Administration

In this module, students will deepen and extend their ability to create and maintain high-quality relationships with people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and possess different points of view in order to create and execute processes that produce successful outcomes and results. This module teaches business managers and leaders to reflect critically on concepts from the behavioural sciences that can be applied to a fast-changing business environment to improve their abilities to lead and manage in organisations. Behavioural frameworks for individuals, teams, and organisations are evaluated critically and discussed in the context of real-world cases. Tutorial groups provide practice in problem-based teamwork, communicating in specialist and non-specialist registers, and applying the frameworks in practice.

In this module, students will gain the capacity to appropriately apply a broad repertoire of communication skills in business, professional, and social contexts. Throughout the module, students will critically analyse managerial communication skills required for leadership in a wide variety of industries. It considers the varied means of communication, including writing, speaking, and calling, and generally appearing professional. The communication requirements of different contexts are studied, including informational, persuasive, and relational forms of communication.

Increases in product variety and customization in the past few years have posed challenges to firms in terms of delivering products to customers faster and more efficiently. With the prevalence of the usage of the Internet for business, electronic business transformations are occurring in every business. One of the fundamental enablers of electronic commerce is effective supply chain management. Thus, supply chain management has become the focus of attention of senior management in the industry today.

This module considers management of a supply chain in a global environment from a managerial perspective. The focus is on analysis, management, and improvement of supply chain processes and their adaptation to the electronic business environment. The module focuses on six topics: Inventory and Information Management; Distribution and Transportation; Global Operations; Supplier Management; Management of Product Variety; and Electronic Supply Chains. Several new concepts including Prognostic Supply Chains, Build-to-Order, Collaborative Forecasting, Delayed Differentiation, Cross Docking, Global Outsourcing, and Efficient Consumer Response will also be discussed. At the end of the module, a student will have the necessary tools and metrics to evaluate a current supply chain and recommend design changes to supply chain processes

This module examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The module develops managerial and leadership competences, focussing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance.

The module provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside of an organisation.

In this module, students will develop specialised and multidisciplinary capacities to generate creative solutions and alternatives to existing business issues by refining their ability to lead processes that stimulate and manage creativity in a business.

Students will reflect critically on templates and methods for designing, implementing, and assessing processes that introduce creativity to real work situations. The module will engage with both the theoretical frameworks and practical methods or tools for cultivating practices of creativity in response to real business challenges.

Ultimately, the module cultivates skills for autonomous managers to lead creative projects, people, and ventures, and to oversee the processes that keep them on track.

This module enables students to develop the skills and concepts needed to ensure the ongoing contribution of a firm's operations to its competitive position. It helps them to understand the complex processes underlying the development and manufacture of products as well as the creation and delivery of services. Throughout the module, students will receive a comprehensive overview of technology utilisation to drive a competitive advantage for company operations. Students explore various technology solutions for business process automation, including value proposition analysis across organisation functions.

Specific topics addressed include process analysis; cross-functional and cross-firm integration; product development; information technology; and technology and operations strategy.

Additionally, students will analyse how technology can be leveraged to improve product development during the four lifecycle phases. The module provides a detailed overview of the impact of technology on various operating models such as manufacturing, supply chain management, customer-facing, product development, and support functions.

In this module students will strengthen their capacity to lead individuals, teams, and organisations in processes that generate data-driven solutions to  problems, data-driven insights into customer behaviour, and data-driven decision-making.

This module provides the foundations of probability and statistics required for a manager to interpret large quantities of data and to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and in both structured and unstructured settings. Theoretical topics include decision trees, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, and sampling.

Ethical dilemmas are frequently encountered in the workplace, in every function of the organisation, and at every level. Knowing how to deal with ethical issues is critical in being able to be an effective leader. Additionally, the range and complexity of ethical issues have increased in recent years, as well as expectations of responsible corporate conduct; knowing how to deal with such concerns is an important part of management today.

In this module, students examine how organisations, and individuals within them, can deal with ethical issues and dilemmas at the collective and personal levels. Throughout the module, students will gain skills related to elements of ethical decision-making, the psychological aspects related to business ethics, and ethics in the global marketplace. The module will focus on how business leaders can make ethical decisions, skilfully manage ethical issues in the workplace, and help encourage ethics in a variety of organisations.

This module is designed to achieve an understanding of fundamental notions of data presentation and analysis and to use statistical thinking in the context of business problems.

The module addresses modern methods of data exploration (designed to reveal unusual or problematic aspects of databases), the uses and abuses of the basic techniques of inference, and the use of regression as a tool for management and for financial analysis. The potential ethical issues related to each topic will be reviewed. Socially and environmentally relevant data will be utilised throughout the module.

The goal of the module is not to turn students into statisticians but to enable them to appreciate the use of probability in assessing evidence and making decisions, and to be statistically literate consumers of quantitative information generated by economists, biomedical researchers, psychologists, statisticians, survey researchers, and other experts.

This module explores the key concepts of marketing and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and operational decisions. It presents both the practical 'how' and the fundamental 'why' of marketing activities in the light of contributions from behavioural science, economics, and statistics. The module provides managers and business leaders with the understanding needed to manage and lead those who implement the marketing activities; the module provides concepts and processes for business leaders that seek to continue developing through future experiences or coursework in marketing. The module then focuses on managing processes. Theoretically, it models business functions as a network of actions that convert inputs into outputs. Process design is considered, including the volume and variety of system inputs and outputs - especially with respect to goods and services. Different inventory management and logistic systems are explored. Finally, forecasting and process optimisation are explored, strengthening managers ability to operate with finite resources.