Master of Arts in Security Studies with Professional Placement

at Birmingham City University - City Centre Campus United Kingdom

Our practical postgraduate fashion design course is an ideal choice if you are passionate about developing a career in Fashion Design.

You’ll develop all the skills and knowledge needed to strengthen your personal creativity and style by taking a professional approach to fashion design.

You will plan your career and benefit from a series of topical lectures which explore major issues linked to the world of fashion design, followed by talks from leading industry practitioners. Many of our graduates go on to start up their own, or even develop existing family businesses.

What's covered in this course?

Your learning will be focused on studio and workshop practice, featuring personal programs of study and joint lectures and seminars.

You’ll also enjoy specialist interpretations of art, craft and design supported by our highly experienced course team.

Based at our city-center Parkside campus, you will have access to a wide range of conventional and CAD facilities available including digital print, digital Jaquard and a Gerber fashion CAD suite, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with a faculty full of creative students.

Your learning environment will encourage you to become an adaptable, flexible and knowledgeable graduate, equipped to pursue a career in the fashion industry.

Our BA Hons Costume Design and Practice degree course will prepare you as a designer practitioner within a breadth of performance genres.

Develop a range of career-specific skills within costume design and practice in a city culturally rich with dance, theatre and the creative arts. You will develop a range of skills applicable to a career within costume design and practice. Birmingham is a city culturally rich with dance, theatre and the creative arts, and collaboration with many of these creative partners is encouraged and embedded within course content. Staff delivering the course are both practitioners and researchers who continue to contribute to their discipline.

Want to study event management in Birmingham? Our BA (Hons) Event, Venue and Experience Management degree allows you to take a year-long placement in industry.

Over the past decade there has been a surge of careers in the global leisure sector that require best-in-class event, venue and guest experience managers.

This innovative and on-trend course will give you the skills, experience and insights to develop a career in the growing area of event management alongside a qualification from the CMI.

What's covered in this course?

Combining theory and practical application the course will draw heavily from practicing event, venue and experience leaders to cover multiple aspects such as marketing, project management, design, operations, analytics, digitization, experiential and client management. Where appropriate to the individual topics covered during the course, implications for sustainability will be identified that relate to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Building upon the insights and close business connections that Birmingham City Business School has made through its Academy of Multi-Unit Leadership (with over 600 graduate managers from industry-leading event and leisure organisations) this undergraduate course will provide the academic expertise and contacts to help you develop an exciting professional future. President of Genting UK, Paul Willcock, describes the course as ‘an exciting and innovative degree that provides exceptionally strong pathways into our industry'.

Prepare yourself for a successful career in Stage Management by studying at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Our BA (Hons) Stage Management degree provides in-depth, practical training; we aim to produce confident graduates who are ready for a successful career in the industry as soon as they leave us. You’ll gain authentic industry experience while developing the vital skills needed in each role of a stage management team.

What's covered in this course?

Our three-year course provides you with a thorough understanding of all aspects of stage management. You’ll also develop an understanding of the core skills in technical theatre and the design elements, widening your knowledge and ability to work in the fast-paced, demanding environment of stage management and further afield.

During your degree you’ll explore all areas of theatrical performance production. Concentrating on the technical and logistical aspects, your studies will investigate lighting and sound, wardrobe, set design, props sourcing, maintenance, and the management and organisation of touring theatre. You’ll also widen your skills base, developing an awareness of the administration and funding of events and small theatre companies as well as the context of theatre today.

At Birmingham Conservatoire we have a vibrant, energetic and stimulating environment. You’ll be taught by our team of highly skilled and experienced staff, who also continue to work with industry.

The BSc (Honours) Accountancy degree at Birmingham City Business School will equip you with the skills and knowledge that you will need to become a professional accountant.

The course provides a valuable insight into the worlds of accountancy practice, commerce and industry, underpinned by principles of good governance and ethical decision-making.

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 broad, covers key current topics such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and help you to appreciate accountancy from a range of perspectives. Ultimately, decision-making in accountancy, calls for one to exercise judgement and intuition and this course helps you to strengthen that judgement.

This will prepare you for a long-term financial career as an accountant, allowing you to progress in many financial and related roles as well as the accounting profession. We create graduates who possess a global outlook, with the conceptual and applied knowledge in the field of accounting that will enable them to make a positive impact on society.

Digital Transformation is an innovative MSc degree course designed for those who want to pursue careers as managers and leaders in implementing technology-based information systems solutions and managing technological transformation within organisations.

What's covered in this course?

Digital Transformation Specialists must understand the complex relationships between people, information, processes and technology in order to support business with digital development. The course will equip you with the requisite multi-dimensional skillset necessary to help organisations unleash their potential to thrive in an inclusive digital society aligned with the innovative application of digital technology to transform organisations, industries and societies.

You will learn:

• Strategic IS Planning: How to develop a strategic IS/IT plan that is aligned to the strategic information needs of the business.
• Enterprise Systems: How to manage the business processes to support the organisation to gain competitive advantage, improve performance, reduce operational cost, implement efficient business processes, and improve real-time decision-making capabilities via Enterprise Systems (ES), which incorporates ERP, CRM, SCM, and so forth.
• Technology Optimisation and Integration: How to analyse the current business IT status, plan technology solutions and develop a roadmap for legacy systems migration.
• Digital Change Management: How to address the socio-technology challenges of leveraging value from the IS/IT in the digital society using agile methods. This involves making sense of the business requirements in order to ensure the end products will solve the business problem.
• Business Intelligence and Technology Entrepreneurship: How to manage and apply a range of visualisation tools to analyse and make business sense of data lakes, and to exploit data to construct informed business decisions.
• Principles of Project Management: How to deliver strategic value within an organisation and ensure the project (or business solution) is completed on time, within budget, within scope and at the desired performance level.
• Individual Master’s Project: A practice-based module working in collaboration with an organization or research-based project within the Socio-Technical Systems Research group to apply multi-disciplinary skills to design innovative solutions to the challenges of digital transformation.

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.

Do you want to be a design thinker? Is your goal to use a design strategy to transform businesses, cultures, and lives? Alternatively, do you want to develop your own design business? If your answer is yes, then this course is for you!

This course invites designers and non-designers to apply design thinking and business-speak to create innovative and purposeful outcomes. On this course, you sharpen your strategic edge through expanding your entrepreneurial and business capabilities. If you are a non-designer, you learn to be a creative thinker.

You bring the knowledge from your past education and practice, combine them with the subject knowledge of design management, and create solutions that are not just aesthetically pleasing but also functional, viable, and purposeful. The course brings excellent networking opportunities for you to facilitate knowledge building and collaborative learning.

On this postgraduate course, we teach you the interdisciplinary issues that design managers work with, such as business, marketing, technology, and art. Immersed in practice, you acquire the skills and the confidence to manage and lead a project. You are encouraged to push the boundaries and to put forward new, improved ideas that are innovative and purposeful.

Design thinking, design strategy, creativity, research, and problem-solving are applied extensively to all the modules. You undertake projects individually and in a team, where you learn communication, management, and interpersonal skills. You work with industry partners with the utmost professionalism. You pursue an industry-based inquiry, which may be a placement. And, you acquire and apply people management, client management, and project management tactics while working on industry projects and teams.

Professional Placement option

The Professional Placement version of the course is optional and 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 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.

Want to study a forensic psychology Master’s in Birmingham? This MSc Forensic Psychology course offers you the chance to learn about some of the most dangerous offenders in society and, their victims.

It will explore, approaches to assisting police with their enquires (investigative psychology), the criminal justice system from a psychological perspective and how to enhance your skills in communication, group work, professionalism and application of IT.

We also aim to improve your research skills and knowledge, through teaching you how to design high-level research projects, conduct statistical analysis, and to evaluate and scientifically report research findings.

The core aim of the course is to prepare students to work with clients and professionals in a range of forensic and forensics-related settings. Equipped with a sound knowledge of key theoretical and applied issues in forensic psychology, you will gain not only a critical appreciation of theoretical and factual concepts, but an awareness of the strengths and limitations of research evidence. The course integrates psychological theory with the development of practical skills and an understanding of professional practice.

Looking for Sociology courses in Birmingham? Our BA (Hons) Sociology degree allows you to take a year-long placement in industry, gaining invaluable experience before you graduate.

Sociology helps us make sense of the societies in which we live and our place within them.

As one of our longest established courses, you’ll benefit from a programme of study taking an in-depth look at contemporary sociological issues that has been honed over several decades.

What's covered in this course?

You’ll explore and question social norms and discover the complex issues behind day-to-day routines and social practices.

We explore patterns and processes of inequality, examine the structure and dynamics of social hierarchies and power relations and ask why and how people shape their identities and practice their lives. We encourage you to explore how sociological knowledge can connect individuals and how it can provide you with the skills needed to participate in debates not just about what society is but how it could be.

Through the links we’ve developed with work-place organisations such as local School Academies, Citizens Advice Bureau and Woman’s Aid, we help support you to make professional contacts and to apply your studies to real-world situations when taking part in voluntary work or on placement. We also enjoy close links with the city of Birmingham itself, a diverse community perfect for sociological examination.

Looking for a security studies Master’s in Birmingham? Our MA Security Studies is open to graduates from all subjects.

The subject of security has considerable contemporary relevance, both nationally and internationally. A long and diverse list of issues have been characterised as security threats from warfare to global warming.

On this Master's you will consider events such as these across a range of different perspectives discussing their implications for security at the international, national and local levels as well as their relevance to different actors such as the state and the individual.

For example, the ongoing Syrian civil war and the breakdown of the Syrian state may represent a security risk for the UK by giving groups likes ISIS the space to operate and potentially attack the West. However, if we alter our focus we quickly become aware of a range of different insecurities felt by civilians displaced from their homes and struggling to survive as a result of the conflict.

Professional Placement option

For our MA Security Studies degree, 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.