Graduate Certificate in Business

This subject is designed to enable students to enhance their ability to prepare and use financial information in decision making – crucial skills in business. The subject begins by examining core concepts in accounting and developing students’ ability to prepare financial reports. The subject then explores how that knowledge and information may be used to inform decision making by diverse stakeholders in a variety of business contexts including via the preparation of a business case to support a major financial decision and through consideration of various current issues faced in accounting and business.

The subject provides an introduction to the fundamentals of microeconomics and strategy, and applies this knowledge to a number of business and management issues. Topics to be covered include: the working of competitive markets and the determination of market prices and quantities; the organisation of the firm and various measures of the costs of production; business strategies and market outcomes in different market environments; and public policy towards business in the presence of “external costs” in production.

The subject introduces students without a strong mathematical background to some of the methods used to collect, present and analyse data and to provide illustrative applications to decision problems faced by business managers. Topics will be chosen from: sources of data; sampling and collection of primary data; presentation and summary measures of data; random variation of data and some implications for hypothesis testing and forecasting; an introduction to decision models with uncertainty; the use and interpretation of estimated regression equations; some forecasting methods used by business.

This subject is designed to equip students with the tools necessary to enable them to make the core decisions faced by managers and investors. The first part of the subject deals with establishing the environment in which organizations operate, namely the objectives of the suppliers of financial and human capital. The subject then considers the basic tools commonly employed by financial managers and investors including discounted cash flow techniques and financial mathematics. Measures and definitions of alternative forms of risk are considered and the relation between risk and expected reward in capital markets is established. Finally, the subject considers the important decisions faced by firms (investment, financing, dividend policy, hedging and executive compensation) and by investors (the composition of their optimal retirement portfolio).

This subject will focus on developing students’ understanding of a wide variety of strategic and operational business problems and decisions being faced by managers and decision makers in the fields of financial management, human resource management, marketing management, operations management, and international business management. Students will be shown how to use a range of quantitative approaches to analyze business problems and, based on these analyses, make effective decisions. The subject will take descriptive analytic, predictive analytic, and prescriptive analytic approaches. Students will be expected to be able to calculate and manipulate data as well as interpret the results in order to derive and evaluate alternative solutions to typical business problems.

This subject exposes students to an integrated perspective of the firm, how it interfaces with its environment, and how it creates and sustains value. Critical to the creation of value is the way a firm interacts with its various stakeholders. The subject builds a conceptual framework to examine the choices managers face in determining how best to create value, and how these choices may be shaped by key stakeholders including: government, society, trading partners, customers, employees and competitors. A key focus of this subject is on value creation as a cross disciplinary and cross firm activity. As such, the focus is on value creation from multiple disciplinary perspectives including strategy, entrepreneurship, marketing, HRM, supply chain management and organisational design.