Business Consulting and Psychology, _MSc

This course, which is prescribed for all taught postgraduate students, is studied entirely online, takes approximately 5-6 hours to complete and can be taken in one sitting, or spread across a number of weeks.

Topics include orientation overview, equality and diversity, health, safety and cyber security and how to make the most of your time at university in relation to careers and employability.

Successful completion of this course will be recorded on your Enhanced Transcript as ‘Achieved’.

15 Credit Points

Rapid changes in world business and advances in technology mean companies are seeking new ways to compete and innovate. Business consultants can offer much needed advice and expertise. This course is intended to introduce you to the work of business consultants and identify the competencies you will require to apply for a career in consultancy. The course will be taught by practicing consultants and will cover both theoretical as well as practical aspects of business consultancy.

15 Credit Points

The focus of this course is not people but processes, not outside the organisation but within. Operations transform materials, information and customers to create goods and services using staff and facilities. We study process types and focus particularly on projects. We see how capacity and inventory reconcile demand and output and explore location, supply chains, quality, risk and resilience. About 40% of the course is on projects and project-management techniques. Prepare for both critical discussion of theory and application (operationalisation), including calculation.

15 Credit Points

At some point in our lives we will, hopefully, enter the world of work and be met with some of the challenges and issues which confront organisations globally such as managing organisational change, how to create a talent pipeline and how to create high performing teams. This online module provides an opportunity for students to understand the role of Occupational Psychology in dealing with these challenges and how psychological theory underpins practice in the workplace and across organisations.

15 Credit Points

This in-person course covers two areas relevant to the performance and safety of organisations and their workers: culture and conflict.

Culture: ‘The way we do things around here’ – the rules and norms that govern employee behaviour. We will discuss organisational, national and professional culture, alongside multi-cultural teams.

Conflict: Differing experiences and backgrounds can produce disagreement, sometimes resulting in rudeness and bullying, adversely impacting worker performance and wellbeing. We will discuss conflict, the impact on staff, plus management strategies.

15 Credit Points

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.

15 Credit Points

Business consultants can offer much needed advice and expertise across diverse areas that require an in-depth understanding of the people working in these areas to do so. Psychology Toolkit for Consulting course offers students an introduction into the a range of tools used by psychologist when consulting across these varied industries. The course will be taught by a practicing consultant and experienced academic and will cover both theoretical as well as practical aspects of psychological tools used in consulting.

15 Credit Points

This course provides an opportunity to explore and develop an understanding of your own leadership behaviour. Through workshops, 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 frameworks for developing a deeper understanding of leadership behaviour. You will also have an opportunity to try out a range of practical tools and techniques to assist you in the development of your own approach to leadership.

15 Credit Points

Positive psychology is “the scientific study of what goes right in life” and “what makes life most worth living” (Peterson, 2006). Focusing on what is right with people is increasing being successfully applied to the world of work thus creating work settings which provide the greatest satisfaction amongst workers and where people, teams and organisations flourish and thrive. This course considers how the application of positive psychology theory and models can help overcome organisational challenges such as change management, motivation and effective leadership.

60 Credit Points

The MSc Consulting Challenge requires students to produce a consulting report based upon their experience consulting for a company of their choice or a case study provided by the course convenor.

Advanced level knowledge and practice of a sub-area of the discipline is developed through practical interaction with the chosen business or detailed case study material. The students will be assigned an academic supervisor to oversee their research, data collection and report preparation.

60 Credit Points

The MSc dissertation provides students with the opportunity to produce a piece of independent and original research on an approved topic in business and psychology. Advanced level knowledge of a sub-area of the discipline is developed through independent study supervised by a member of academic staff. Students can choose a research problem related to change management and explore it further using theoretical and practical knowledge gained throughput the programme.