Online Business Studies 2026-2027

This short course is designed to enable the candidate to develop a broad knowledge and understanding of the skills and practices which will be needed to establish, develop and maintain a business as a self-employed person.

Delivered by the University’s experienced Staff Development team, the programme addresses leadership in three overlapping levels. At the core, foundational level, is personal leadership: understanding your own behaviours and actions, and what leadership means for you. Next is how you lead in relation to others; how you communicate, interact, direct and influence to build your team. The outer level is leadership in a wider context, taking an organisational view on how your role as a leader can support the achievement of your team through motivating and engaging them to succeed.

The course provides students with an understanding of the role of marketing in creating and maintaining customer value and increasing market share of a brand. The course provides insights regarding contemporary issues such as sustainability, ethics, and digitalisation etc., affecting the marketing functions, and relevant critical strategies that reflects a brand’s objective(s). The aim of the course is creating understanding on how marketers effectively plan and control marketing activities. The course provides knowledge that helps students in developing creative and meaningful strategic recommendations and solutions for a brand.

This theoretically informed and practical course aims to explore the key concepts and theories of consumer behaviour. At the end of the course students will have an understanding of:    

- The activities individuals undertake when obtaining, consuming and disposing of products and services

- The consumer as an individual: Understanding motivations, psychographics, demographics and cognitive processes.

- Social and group aspects of consumer behaviour: The role of friends, family and reference groups.

- This will be achieved through a combination of lectures, seminars and directed private study.

The focus of this module is not on personnel but on processes. The application of processes, methods, knowledge and skills enables us to achieve our objectives.

This module will focus on five main themes:

• Planning for Success

• Work Breakdown

• Estimation: Time, Resources and Cost

• Scheduling

• Project Delivery and Evaluation

Through a combination of lectures, tutorials, workshops, debates and in-course assessment, this course encourages students to critically reflect upon: Social theory and its relevance to marketing communications; Concepts and contemporary thought within the practice of marketing communication; expressive practice.

The course provides both a strategic orientation and tactical orientation:
- Aligning digital strategy with wider business strategy
- Using research and analytics in digital marketing decision-making
- Benchmark a website’s performance against online competitors
- Investigate the potential of a business idea
- Present digital marketing research and advice to a generalist audience
- Understand the potential commercial value of social media
- Interpret onsite analytics in support of business objectives

The energy and the financial sectors rely heavily on analysis based on quantitative and empirical methodologies. This course develops a mathematical and statistical ‘toolbox’ for the participants, essential for the in-depth understanding of economic and financial analysis. This course surveys some of the basic methods used to understand the underlying theories and empirical examples found in these fields. Throughout the course, we use econometric software and data from the energy and financial sectors to interpret key research findings and grow your knowledge in these critical areas.

This course provides an opportunity to explore and develop an understanding of your own ladership behaviour. Through seminars, group activities and discussions we investigate how personality, past experience, current situations and culture shape the way each of us behave in a leadership role. Using this information as a starting point we then explore how different leadership theories and approaches can be used as a frameworks for developing a deeper understanding of leadership behaviour. You will also have an opportunity to assist you in the development of your own approach to leadership.

The concepts of change and innovation have never been more topical, especially given the commercial context of fierce business competition, shorter product life cycles and more demanding customers. Increasingly, long-term commercial success is based on an ability to manage change, to act creatively and to promote innovation; These processes interconnect and overlap and often present major challenges to modern organizations; We address these issues through providing detailed case illustrations ranging from the workplace to the wider business market. Learning is encouraged through interaction, reading, investigation, video and case analysis, and critical discussion.

This course aims to:

• Provide an appreciation of why scenario thinking is needed, what it is based on and its impact on understanding business or policy needs.

• Provide the required management thinking skills and experience of developing plausible scenarios based on your own uncertainties and insights as well as other delegate’s uncertainties and insights.

• Provide a critical understanding of the complex nature of the global business environment and to encourage engagement in a process of multi-future thinking.

An effective marketing plan is critical to a company competing successful in its target markets. Hence, learning the skills and knowledge to develop an effective marketing plan is important for a career in marketing. The course shall explore critical issues in the marketing planning process (identifying target audience and then develop a market strategy to target the identified segment), as well as equip students with a step-by-step guide on how to develop a marketing plan. 

This course will cover strategies for effective brand management.

An essential input into marketing success for any organisation is a focus on customer and prescriber needs and wants as well as an understanding of customer journeys. Once understood, organisations can work on the development, delivery and communication of value propositions.

Within the context of an identified workplace marketing challenge or opportunity, this course guides learners to develop and implement practical marketing insight and/or a marketing solution.

The focus of this course is on teamwork in employing organisations, the issues we’ll cover - the principles of effective team performance, team leadership, team participation - are applicable to team activities in most types of setting. In work organisations, teams and team working has long featured in discussions and research about the effective design of work and jobs and the factors associated with high performance in teams.

This module investigates the concept of the business model and how and why organisations need to regularly challenge the way in which they do business in order to remain relevant and competitive.

This module will focus on five main themes:

• The Business Module and its Component Parts
• The Ten Types of Innovation
• Business Model Patterns
• Disruptive Thinking
• Testing and Evaluating New Business Models