Postgraduate Certificate in Business Administration

This course serves as a foundational exploration into the fundamental principles and concepts of corporate governance. As businesses operate in an increasingly complex and interconnected global landscape, understanding the core tenets of corporate governance becomes imperative for leaders and professionals alike. Participants in this course will embark on a comprehensive journey, delving into the essence of governance structures, ethical considerations, and regulatory frameworks that underpin effective corporate oversight. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical applications, individuals will gain a nuanced understanding of how sound corporate governance fosters transparency, accountability, and sustainable organisational success. In the initial part of the course, participants will unravel the key elements of corporate governance, examining the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders, including boards of directors, executives, shareholders, and regulatory bodies.

The course will navigate through the historical evolution of corporate governance, highlighting pivotal milestones and evolving best practices that have shaped the contemporary business landscape. As the exploration progresses, emphasis will be placed on ethical considerations, guiding participants in the development of a strong ethical framework that aligns with corporate values and societal expectations. This foundational knowledge will lay the groundwork for participants to critically analyse case studies, engage in discussions, and ultimately apply general corporate governance concepts to real-world scenarios, fostering a holistic and practical understanding of governance principles.

This module will approach leadership by identifying practices that researchers and practitioners have shown to be the most effective. Through these processes, students will gain a broad range of skills. 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 competencies, focusing 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. Specific topics covered include managing a diverse workforce; self-leadership; perception pitfalls; decision making; conflict resolution; emotional intelligence; improving performance; team structure.

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 gain the capacity to understand how firms work in a global context, incorporating a broad, future-oriented, systems-based approach that incorporates data, information and insights from diverse perspectives and sources. This module is designed to convey the key concepts of strategic thinking and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and decisions. Students will be presented with both the practical “how” and the fundamental “why” in the light of contributions from behavioural science, economics, and statistics.

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.

Managers require a broad array of negotiating skills to implement business solutions – this requires advanced knowledge of negotiation models, the competence to select the right strategy, and the tactical skills to achieve desired outcomes through negotiation

In addition to studying key negotiation theories, the module develops skills in negotiation, providing students with the opportunity to test and improve their abilities through discussions that model negotiation scenarios, through the use of case studies, and through reflection and feedback.

Students will review and test various approaches to negotiated conflict resolution (at small personal scales and large organisational scales). The module builds competencies in developing an effective professional and personal style of negotiation.

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.

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.

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 course serves as a foundational exploration into the fundamental principles and concepts of corporate governance. As businesses operate in an increasingly complex and interconnected global landscape, understanding the core tenets of corporate governance becomes imperative for leaders and professionals alike. Participants in this course will embark on a comprehensive journey, delving into the essence of governance structures, ethical considerations, and regulatory frameworks that underpin effective corporate oversight. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical applications, individuals will gain a nuanced understanding of how sound corporate governance fosters transparency, accountability, and sustainable organisational success. In the initial part of the course, participants will unravel the key elements of corporate governance, examining the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders, including boards of directors, executives, shareholders, and regulatory bodies.

The course will navigate through the historical evolution of corporate governance, highlighting pivotal milestones and evolving best practices that have shaped the contemporary business landscape. As the exploration progresses, emphasis will be placed on ethical considerations, guiding participants in the development of a strong ethical framework that aligns with corporate values and societal expectations. This foundational knowledge will lay the groundwork for participants to critically analyse case studies, engage in discussions, and ultimately apply general corporate governance concepts to real-world scenarios, fostering a holistic and practical understanding of governance principles.