Hello, my name is Mark Foster, I'm the
Admissions Tutor but I'm also a Programme Director for one of the
programmes I'll go through with you later in this presentation.
Thanks for joining us, hopefully you'll gain some information
from this presentation, I suppose the big question is why Birmingham Business
School? Well, we have been teaching business now
for over 100 years, we have the prestigious Triple Crown
accreditation, basically those are the quality assurance organisations
that look into the standards of teaching and learning
at business schools, and effectively they've given us top marks.
We have partnerships with business - KPMG, Capgemini, Lloyds Banking spring to
mind, but also smaller independent businesses as well.
The faculty, well, we're all based in a dedicated and
largely autonomous business school, we like to think that we set our
own rules within the University, we like to think that we
plow our own furrow, we look at a wide set of business models within the
programmes, obviously we look at corporations, they
tend to be the ones that get the most attention,
particularly in the news, but having said that
90% of UK companies are made up of 10 or fewer employees, so we look at
small firms as well and we look at entrepreneurship.
We hope by doing that it reflects the diverse
set of economic activities within the city of Birmingham
and the surrounding area. Why Birmingham Business School? Well,
great employability -Ii'll come on to that in more depth in a moment - the Chartered
Management Institute has recognised the programmes and you can, if you sign up in
your final year, get accreditation at level five - that's
effectively putting you up the rung of the
professional development ladder a bit. Likewise, the Chartered Institute of
Marketing has given accreditation to the 'with Marketing' programme and again
that puts you up a couple of rungs on the ladder.
Now, going back to employability, in the past few years,
six months after graduation, around 90% of students from Birmingham Business
School went on to a graduate job or continued
in education and 93% of our Business Management students would
recommend the University of Birmingham as a great place to study.
That's based on the National Student Survey in 2017
but what's good for us here in the Business School
is that 81% of students expressed overall satisfaction
with their learning experience on the Business Management programmes - that's
again the NSS survey 2018 and that's up from 74 in 2017, so we
we're hopefully traveling in the right direction in terms of
student satisfaction. Why Birmingham Business School? Well,
what you're looking at at the moment is a 28 million pound extension
to the School. You'll see on the left hand side, that's
actually was originally a dormitory for female students, but it's
been the home of the Business School since many years ago, and
in 1996 it had an extension and last year this new extension
opened and it allows faculty to have more small
group working with students, more tutorials and more
seminars and it is a state-of-the-art building.
The pathways that we offer, well there's this straightforward three-year
Business Management undergraduate course,
there's Business Management with Communications, which I'm the Director of
and there's Business Management with Marketing.
Then, for your course, Business Management with the Year in Industry, and you can do
that with Communications and also with Marketing
and International Business, again that's a four-year programme
and you can do that with Business and with a language if you're studying a
language, particularly if you want to go and
develop that in your year abroad. The typical way that a programme would
look, in year one, it's a common first year,
all of these modules are compulsory, each year is made up of a number of
modules and each module is worth 20 credits and you need to
attain 120 credits a year and so year one,
organisations management, entrepreneurship,
that's looking at the structures, cultures, individuals
who make up the workplace. Students are encouraged to think
like entrepreneurs and recognise business opportunities when they occur,
introduction to marketing and communications, well, if you decide, well
sorry, you don't decide because you've got to do it, but you'll see
me, that's one of the modules that I deliver, both the marketing and
communications. Marketing - very much is a foundation into
the world of marketing, looking at the basic principles
like product, place, promotion and price - the 'Four P's' as
they're known and also looking at the corporate
communications, the corporate story, if you like - the organisation,
its culture, image, the individuals that make it up
and that's both for internal and external
audiences. Managing financial resources, well, that's really the nuts and bolts of
running a company, students are shown how to not just
understand corporate financial reports but also to
interpret them, to enable better decision making.
Economics - A or B - depends on your mathematical
ability or grades at A level. Management education
and learning, well, that's really your personal professional and
academic development as you progress through your
career at University, digital business, well, that reflects the
ongoing march of businesses towards the digital side of
technology - students look at among
other things data analytics and digital strategies,
and finally widening business horizons - this enables students to
look at business issues on a global stage,
so they're looking at knowledge creation, artificial intelligence and
leadership. Now, as you progress you'll find that you have more choice
over the modules that you take, so in your second and final years the
number of compulsory modules declines and you can shape your degree
according to taste - what you like, employment
opportunities, if you're looking ahead when you
graduate and also capability - what are you actually good at,
and modules are offered in the various areas like responsible business. I
mentioned Lloyds Banking, we have a partnership with them in that
area - research methods management, marketing, communications
obviously, if you're doing the 'with Marketing', 'with Communications'
as a compulsory anyway, finance business economics and
international business and strategy. So you can see there's a wide field for
you to choose from. Now, if you're doing Business Management
with Communications, that's sometimes known as
Business Management with Creativity, so if you've got a sort of
arts feel to you, rather than the science, then maybe
this is something you'll consider if you're interested in communication,
then maybe this is something for you. Research shows that organisations
that have effective communication structures
perform better than those that don't,
it's quite inventive, it is creative assignments, including for example
individual podcasts and group video production,
we have specialist guest lectures, we've had them from leading
PR companies, we've had them from the BBC, from Greenpeace even and
you'll look at internal, external communications,
corporate reputation, creative campaign production,
and there will be a communications placement that's normally taken
at the end of the second year during the summer break, so between the second and
third year depending on which programme you're doing,
and that involves 100 hours in a communications role
with an organisation, and we've seen graduates
go on to be employed in marketing, communications,
PR, corporate communications, social and digital
media agencies, but many other areas as well. Some indeed have set up their own
businesses. With marketing, well that's a pathway for
specialising in marketing theory and practice
and it's been developed by world renowned marketing academics here at the
Business School, some of whom have written
the text that you will read. A lot of Year in Industry placements
were in the marketing area and we're now widening that scope, there is, by the way
a dedicated Year in Industry team to help you find
placements and as I said before, it's recognised by
the Chartered Institute of Marketing. International Business, so that
is a four-year course, the years one, two and the final year are
spent studying at Birmingham. Year three would be abroad at one of our
exchange partners, for example we've got partners in Spain,
South Korea, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Japan
and many more. There is a team that can help you with this, but also
if you really want to go and study somewhere you
can go and find your own partner academic institution. I once had a
student who was absolutely determined to go and study in the United States and
managed to find her own place at Kansas University.
Year in industry again is four years, years one, two and the final year spent in
Birmingham, year three, well, that's spent working at a graduate level
role - can be in the UK but also can be abroad.
Like I said before you do get support from the
dedicated Year in Industry Careers team and placements are available at
companies like Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Aldi, KPMG,
Warner Brothers and Disney, which doesn't mean to say it's a Mickey Mouse degree if you
go to Disney ha ha, but there are also smaller companies
that students have gone to and and it enabled
them in some ways to make more of an impact
and again, students can find their own
placements. Going back to one of my students, who
desperately wanted to go and work in New York so found his own place at the
leading PR company there. All the programmes are
taught over two semesters and we recognise that
from the start of the semester to the end of it, you might have
forgotten what you studied at the beginning,
so revision and support weeks are built into that programme so you
you're not going to be thrown into exams or assignments
without the opportunity to mug up on the subject.
Assessments are staged throughout and at the end of
each semester and we do try to pace them so that you don't get a glut
of assessments over a particular holiday period,
we do have big lectures we do have a large cohort,
sometimes lectures are 300 or more students,
but equally we are very keen to have small group-working break those
large cohorts down into seminars and tutorials
to enable you to get more interaction with
fellow students and also your tutors and lecturers.
We've worked with a variety of media,
assessments and particularly now as I mentioned, video
podcasts, posters, magazines, presentations
in the hope that students get to express themselves as well as they
can through a variety of media. We have industry experts who come in to
help deliver the modules and also assess them.
There is as you might imagine a lot of digital content, it's held on
something called 'Canvas' which is the virtual learning environment which
you will become very familiar with if you come here
and as I said we've got a varied assessment structure.
What we want from you, well, grades AAB at A level or
International Baccalaureate with a 32 overall score.
You must have at least grades B in English Language and Maths at GCSE
level and I'm afraid that's a deal breaker - if you haven't got that
you'll have to go back and resit it. If you're doing a B-Tech
then three distinctions are required but
beyond the qualifications, what we also want from you
are inquiring minds - students who want to find out
about the world of business and what is actually going on, students who are
motivated, self-driven and also students who want
to challenge the status-quo, who want to
question us, effectively we're all learning as we go
along. In addition to that we have what's
called your 'Birmingham Offer', this is individual
to you, it will take into account not just baccalaureates and A Levels
but look at your GCSE results, look at the studies,
subjects you're studying as well as
the main ones, clearly your predicted grades
but also looking at your personal statement and your school reference
and so don't think that personal statements don't get read, they are
important, they can make the difference between being
accepted or not, so that's something you do need to work on
and we will also look at your personal circumstances - your school
is it in an underperforming category, household income, any caring
responsibilities and where do you live. So we take all
of that into account but if you want to find out more about
that then have a look and complete the offer calculator
or speak to an Admissions Tutor.
This is being recorded so you'll have ample time to go back over
some sections but here are the contact details,
admissions inquiries, Programme Directors
for Marketing - that's Dogga Istanbulluoglu, and for me,
you can see there it's m.foster.1. So hopefully you've found that of use,
hopefully it's given you a taste for for the type of
university you would be entering - good luck with your studies and i hope to see
some of you at the University, at the Business School
in the autumn of 2021.