Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Human Resource Management with Professional Placement

at Birmingham City University - City Centre Campus United Kingdom

Public Relations is all around us. Brands, businesses, celebrities, charities, politicians and everyone in between use PR as a means to spread messages, inform understanding and influence the way we behave. Creative PR practitioners run multi-channel campaigns, liaise with journalists and producers, collaborate with influencers and run social media channels - whatever it takes to raise awareness, encourage engagement and inspire action on behalf of the organisation they work with.

If you want to change the world, this PR course is the one for you. Likewise, if you want to work with household names or launch new products, services or initiatives, BCU is the place to learn the skills needed for a fast-paced, exciting and rewarding media and communications career.

Did you know that for every journalist in the UK, there are at least three PR or communications professionals? This is because PR is the thread by which media, social media and communications is held together in a time of instant news, information and entertainment.

Join a course recognised by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and be proud of its close links with industry. They work with us, providing many and varied guest speakers who contribute insights and live projects, as well as a supportive mentor scheme offered by practitioners in the region and beyond.

What's covered in this course?

Combining practical skills and industry insights, Public Relations and Media offers a truly unique blend of communication perspectives that will put you in the very best position to pursue a PR career.

Turn your ideas into a reality and be brave with your approach to your work; in PR, there is no such thing as a bad idea, there is always potential and this course will help you realise yours.

Informed by the working approaches of top PR, communication and digital teams across the UK and beyond, this course will develop your understanding, awareness and appreciation of PR as a concept and a discipline. You’ll become a critical media consumer and you’ll draw upon your own areas of interest to assess influence and impact in action. You’ll turn this knowledge into your own creative campaigns, so from the moment you begin, you will be able to build an impressive production portfolio that will make you stand out from the recruitment crowd.

Our BA (Hons) Textile Design degree courses nurture fresh thinking and industry-ready creatives through a dynamic and carefully structured three-year program.

Our Embroidery option appeals to students who love to build onto and into surfaces, and enjoy working with diverse materials and threads. Drawing on the rich heritage of the subject, the focus during the course is on exploring the new possibilities with the materials and technologies that exist today. Alongside hand skills, including tambour beading and goldwork, you become confident with using specialist digital embroidery software and equipment. Students often work onto surfaces they have printed, creating designs with rich surface qualities and dramatic compositions. Ideally suited to working within the luxury end of the market, there are a wide range of applications for embroidery including performance, illustration and visual merchandising.

Studying with us will provide you with the skills, insights and experiences required to succeed in a broad scope of professional textile-related roles. Embroidery students secure placements with fashion and interior companies, design studios, designer-makers, arts organisations, costume departments, stylists and trend agencies.

By the end of your degree you will have a clear vision of where you fit in the industry and a tailored professional portfolio to take with you. Our BA (Hons) Textile Design: Embroidery graduates are employed as Couture Embroidery Designers, Studio Designers, Designer Makers, Artists and Facilitators and Trend Forecasters. They also take up other roles where their material sensitivity, creativity and problem-solving is valued.

Our brand new hub for the arts in the thriving Eastside of the city has been purpose-built to stimulate creative minds within an open-access, contemporary studio environment. You will become a part of our lively and close-knit student community and be guided by an experienced and passionate team of staff who value the importance of getting to know you as an individual.

Our BA (Hons) Illustration degree course aims to give those with a passion for image-making and illustration the skills they need to capture and communicate ideas through pictures. We celebrate the challenge of finding your individual visual voice through experimenting, risk-taking and critical reflection. You will also explore how your work can be applied across a wide range of contexts, from commercial work to personally-driven projects.

This course provides an opportunity to development a wide range of transferable skills and design process knowledge that is highly desirable to employers.

What's covered in this course?

Our challenging and exciting Illustration course will help you develop new skills and different ways of thinking, enabling you to find your own individual, visual voice and prepare you for the ever-changing creative industry.

The course celebrates the synthesis between illustration and all the other visual communication subject disciplines, leading to the development of strong student collaborations that again aims to reflect industry practice.

We support a lively creative community, encouraging the value of peer learning. This learning is supplemented by an integrated workshop programme that provides the opportunity to work alongside, and be informed by, industry experts from a wide range of disciplines.

Want to study a Film Production degree? Explore the fundamentals of technology in film, from narrative, composition and film theory to camera testing, designing digital production workflows and post-production.

Like the film industry itself, BSc Digital Film Production enables students to exercise a broad range of technical and creative skills with the support of the university’s cutting edge facilities and software, including our Parkside Media Centre.

What's covered in this course?

The Digital Film Production degree course combines a study of audiovisual technologies and production processes, with contextual investigations and production experience. You’ll develop knowledge, understanding and skills relevant to the production of digital film content and to the wider film, television and video industries.

You’ll focus on fundamental technical concepts, including the physics of sound and light being recorded during production (and the tools and techniques required to do this), as well as the technology used to digitally store and manipulate both images and audio in post-production.

When you graduate, you will be versatile, technically literate, and creative: well-equipped to perform a variety of craft roles within film, television and video production and will bridge the gap between technology specialists and creative artists.

Birmingham City University is a great place to study - the city has an active and accessible film-making community, and you will be studying in the same campus as undergraduates studying a range of arts, including acting, music, photography, fashion and theatre.

You’ll also be encouraged to engage with industry, with a number of flexible paths to help you gain work experience, including: basing selected modules around work experience, taking a placement year and working on commercial productions within the University.

The world of finance is rapidly changing, with new innovative financial products being developed on a constant basis. The present times have also witnessed an unprecedented number of companies failing because of poor financial management. All these challenges call for dynamic and brilliant people who can design financial solutions and make the world a better place.

The degree is designed to equip you with wider business and Finance environment knowledge. Offering you the opportunity to acquire key business and financial skills, explore innovative practices and entrepreneurial skills. The course is accredited by Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments (CISI). The course also aligns with various other professional bodies courses such as Association of Corporate Treasures (ACT), Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), and many others.

Delivery of the course is flexible and includes a blend of lectures, workshops, field trips and online learning. The modules, which feed into the course, are widespread, broad, covers key current topics such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and help you to appreciate finance from a range of perspectives. Ultimately, decision making in finance, calls for one to exercise their judgement and intuition and this course helps you to strengthen that judgement.

The course team has, between it, years of industrial experience in the finance field as well in academia. Therefore, students with little or no background in finance are assured of getting all the help they need in order to excel in the course. You will learn a lot from course team’s knowledge and experience, as you will be regularly engaging in inquiry based and experiential learning, which has been designed to assimilate work-based scenarios.

In order to enhance your employability, extra-curricular activities such as trading trainings, conferences and field trips will be arranged throughout the academic years. Outside speakers from industry will also be invited to give presentations on how best to improve your employability. Moreover, you’ll also have the opportunity to gain industry experience by going on a professional placement, or to travel overseas to study abroad at one of our partner universities. In a nutshell, the knowledge attained from the course will help you to seek a variety of employment in the sector nationally and internationally.

The MSc Building Surveying program with Facilities Management is designed to respond to the dynamic demands for sustainable management of the existing built environment and is accredited by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

What's covered in this course?

The course is founded on the principal that participants intend to attain membership of the RICS. The program, therefore, embraces the values of the RICS and reflects the requirements of the professional body in terms of core technical and professional skills and attributes. All students are expected to be student or graduate members of the RICS.

The Building Surveying course content and delivery is underpinned by the need to respond to the RICS Strategic Foresight 2030 report, including incorporation of the seven strategic pillars for the future within learning, teaching and assessment.

The course will provide you with a broad but solid foundation in the fundamentals of organising, managing, and designing work to existing buildings. It seeks to provide you with the knowledge and skills to meet the challenges presented by the globally evolving built environment marketplace.

This course focuses on developing and expanding the knowledge, understanding and ability of practitioners to respond to the challenges of the 21st century. You will receive a rigorous grounding in the advanced skills needed to operate at a high level in industry and become competent in the solving the problems and challenges you will face. You will also be able to add value to your decisions through a thorough analytical approach and be able to better implement them as a competent building surveyor.

The course encompasses the entirety of the property life cycle, allowing you to appreciate how decisions made in one aspect of a property’s development and use can have a significant impact later on in the life cycle.

Professional Placement option

The Professional Placement option will allow you to complete a credit-bearing, 20-week Professional Placement as an integral part of your Master’s Degree. The purpose of the Professional Placement is to improve your employability skills which will, through the placement experience, allow you to evidence your professional skills, attitudes and behaviours at the point of entry to the postgraduate job market.  Furthermore, by completing the Professional Placement, you will be able to develop and enhance your understanding of the professional work environment, relevant to your chosen field of study, and reflect critically on your own professional skills development within the workplace.

This MSc Cyber Security course provides a broad foundation for Cyber Security concepts while delivering advanced knowledge and skills in key technical areas. Designed to meet the growing demand from global business and industry for robust cyber security systems, this course underpins the principles and practical professional skills you’ll need to meet the future challenges faced by organisations, particularly when it comes to strategic security planning.

This course provides future Cyber Security professionals with the knowledge and skills needed by the employers. Our strong links with industry enable us to teach the most demanding
topics. You will develop state-of-the-art technical knowledge, intellectual know-how, management capabilities and hands-on practical skills to succeed in meeting the Cyber Security challenges faced by modern organisations.

Our academic staff members are actively engaged with government and industry to help solve their complex problems. These strong links provide you with plenty of professional opportunities that will help you to acquire valuable exposure to the real life challenges of Cyber Security.

Professional Placement option

The Professional Placement option will allow you to complete a credit-bearing, 20-week Professional Placement as an integral part of your Master’s Degree. The purpose of the Professional Placement is to improve your employability skills which will, through the placement experience, allow you to evidence your professional skills, attitudes and behaviours at the point of entry to the postgraduate job market. Furthermore, by completing the Professional Placement, you will be able to develop and enhance your understanding of the professional work environment, relevant to your chosen field of study, and reflect critically on your own professional skills development within the workplace.

Our LLM in International Human Rights will expose you to the fundamental aspects of the field and provide you with the opportunity to critically examine the impact of the international human rights standards on national constitutions and laws, with particular focus given to the conflict between international standards and national provision.

The LLM International Human Rights also provides you with an opportunity to assess how international human rights law offers protection to different categories of vulnerable groups.

Additionally, our LLM provides an opportunity to acquire, or build upon existing skills gained from your undergraduate course - enhancing employment opportunities in the legal profession and providing a basis for progression to doctoral studies.

Professional Placement option

For our International Law LLM degrees, you will have the opportunity to take the Professional Placement version of the course, which is offered as an alternative to the standard version of the course.

This will allow you to complete a credit-bearing, 20-week Professional Placement as an integral part of your Master’s Degree. The purpose of the Professional Placement is to improve your employability and transferable skills. The placement experience will allow you to evidence your professional skills, attitudes and behaviours at the point of entry to the postgraduate job market.

The MA in Data Journalism is a cutting-edge course designed to give you the interactive storytelling skills needed to work within a growing number of jobs in the media and beyond.

The course has relationships with Huffpost and the BBC, as well as a number of other organisations covering broadcast, online and print data journalism, all of which are keen to bring in the skills that you will be developing on the course. You should indicate on your application in you wish to be considered for opportunities with those organisations during the course.

Studying under internationally renowned course leaders in a city with a vibrant cultural sector, and with access to a range of media organizations, you’ll learn exciting new skills in data journalism and interactive storytelling across a range of contexts, from mobile-first data journalism on social platforms to practising data-driven journalism within online and broadcast newsroom contexts. Partnerships with newspaper, magazine, online and broadcast organisations provide unique opportunities for students to build contacts and experience, and work on live projects.

A law degree is an important first step into a career in law, as well as an important foundation on the route to many other careers, and Birmingham City University is a long-established provider of legal education to the Birmingham legal community and beyond.

This course has been developed to enable anyone wishing to qualify as a solicitor or barrister to undertake this first, important academic stage of their career. To achieve this, the course has been designed to align with the subjects that you will need to study further in order to successfully undertake the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), while also meeting the requirements of the Bar Standards Board for an undergraduate law degree.

What's covered in this course?

The study of law is both academic and practical, and therefore both of these are important elements in the LLB (Hons) degree at BCU. Theory and academic study are important on an LLB, but so too is the application of that knowledge, and so our LLB (Hons) degree offers plenty of opportunity for you to develop the practical lawyering skills, as well as the transferable skills enhancing your employability, that graduates will need when entering the workplace.

The different pathways on the LLB course will allow you to make decisions regarding the direction in which you want to take your studies, with named degrees in Law with American Legal Studies, Law with Business Law, and Law with Criminal Justice, as well as a broad range of optional modules ranging from more theoretical topics through to those aimed at the practical application of the law in real-world situations.

You will also have the opportunity to put those skills to practical use, both in the local community and beyond. Whether that is through our programme of placement opportunities with local providers such as Citizen’s Advice and various legal advice charities, through opportunities in the local legal community, or via BCU’s own Law Clinic, established to serve the local community from our City Centre campus, there are plenty of options available to you. You can also apply your legal knowledge further afield, through our US internship programme which has been placing students with attorneys throughout the US for over 20 years.

A professional placement year is also available, between years 2 and 3 of the degree, offering further opportunity for you to put your knowledge and skills to practical use, and thereby enhancing your CV further.

By focussing on the development of a range of transferable skills, the course employs numerous innovative assessment methods, going beyond the typical forms of written academic assessment.

You are also encouraged to engage in extra-curricular activities to support your learning, with student societies such as the highly successful Mooting Society. Furthermore, you will have the ability to engage with the wider Birmingham legal community through our connections with the Birmingham Law Society, the largest regional law society in the UK.