Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design and Art Direction

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

There are few aspects of business more fundamental than people: they’re a vital ingredient of any organisation. It’s down to the HR professionals to deal with a vast range of business-critical issues, shaping workplace policies like redundancy, maternity leave and rewards, and supporting strategic decisions on areas like recruitment.

The best HR professionals have an in-depth understanding of how organisations operate and what the business objectives are – helping them advise employees and partner with the business.

We’ll help you explore the latest thinking in the subject, starting with first principles of managing people, analysing information and understanding behaviour. From there, you’ll expand into topics like managing across cultures and leading change. And, in your final year, you’ll also be able to pick your own subject as a research topic.

By the time you graduate, you won’t just have extensive knowledge of the role, you’ll also have a deeper understanding of the business and legislative landscape. In other words, you’ll leave ready to start your career in the world of HR.

Placement options

Our BA (Hons) Human Resource Management degree offers the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It’s an opportunity to develop core skills, explore your career goals and discover about how your industry really functions – and shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

Our Business School Placement Team is ready to help. They offer a wide range of services, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs. They’re well connected, with an extensive network of relationships with placement employers locally, nationally and internationally. But it’s also up to you – the more proactive you are about applying for placement opportunities, the better.

People are critical to organisational success and, as a HR professional, you play a vital role in your approach to managing people by championing decent work and driving productivity. This course will provide you with the knowledge and expertise to add value to organisations.

Open to students from all academic backgrounds, this course is designed to give you a thorough grounding in the world of HR. It will help you to develop the specialist skills you’ll need to progress to HR management (HRM) roles, or to take the next step in your current HR career.

Adding value
Strong HRM can make a real difference to organisations. You can have a positive impact on business performance by championing decent work and productivity.

Whether you already work in HR and want to become professionally qualified, or you're looking to move into the field, we’ll help you to achieve your ambition. You can choose to study a PgDip or the full MSc, whichever suits your commitments and motivations. We also offer a part-time study option for applicants who are currently working in, or have experience working in, HR or people management.

How might modern-day pressures be impacting on children’s mental health? How do our individual experiences of childhood influence our views and perspectives? How can children and young people participate in society and how can this contribute to changes in policy and practice?

From exploring feminism and queer theory to analysing the thinking of key philosophers, on this course you’ll study the complex factors that affect children’s lives and explore ways to positively shape and influence their futures.

In each year of the course, you’ll learn about the different elements that impact on a child’s development. Studying subjects drawn from a range of disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, and criminology, you’ll consider ethics, welfare, and the importance of policy and legislation relating to children, such as the Human Rights Act (1998). You’ll also learn about how childhood has changed over time both in the UK and globally and consider alternative perspectives relating to child development, including post-structuralism, socio-cultural theory and creative play.

You’ll reflect on your own experience of childhood and explore how it was shaped by society. You’ll also consider the diverse experiences of children, young people, families and communities and how policy on local, national and international levels affects children’s lives.

This course will give you the opportunity to study for an Early Years Education Level 3 qualification alongside your degree. When you graduate you will receive a degree, and a Level 3 Early Years Educator qualification which meets the national requirements set by Ofqual.

BA (Hons) Filmmaking is a practice-based course giving you the creative freedom to develop your voice through the dynamic language of film.

Our learning environment incorporates a unique mix of digital art and film school philosophies, empowering you to express your ideas and stories through narrative fiction, documentary, artists’ moving image and new media. You will specialise in original ideas from unique perspectives, with the potential for your work to be screened in international venues.

Studying at the School of Digital Arts means learning beyond the usual limits. You’ll be part of a vibrant creative community that spans a range of disciplines, from photography and animation, to music and sound design. It’s an environment designed for collaboration – a place where you can push the boundaries of filmmaking, explore the directions that interest you most and develop a broad skill set made for today’s digital arts and media sector. Here, you’ll have access to a vast range of specialist resources and purpose-built facilities, as well as a wealth of opportunities for developing your professional skills, from work experience placements and industry competitions to guest lectures and collaborations with organisations.

The UK film and television industry is a global success story and Manchester is the perfect place to write your own chapter. It’s a major media city, second only to London. The likes of the BBC and ITV are on our doorstep at MediaCityUK, while the city is also home to a thriving, bustling digital production sector, from innovative start-ups to established production companies. For today, that means you’ll have the chance to work on live industry projects – developing practical skills and valuable experience. For tomorrow, that means you’ll graduate in one of the most exciting cities in Europe for starting a career in the creative and digital industries.

Placement options

SODA Placement Year
As part of your studies with SODA, you will have the chance to take a year working on placement within the industry. During your year, you will spend at least 36 weeks working within an organisation in the industry, developing workplace skills, practical understanding and genuine industry experience.

There are few aspects of business more fundamental than people: they’re a vital ingredient of any organisation. It’s down to the HR professionals to deal with a vast range of business-critical issues, shaping workplace policies like redundancy, maternity leave and rewards, and supporting strategic decisions on areas like recruitment.

The best HR professionals have an in-depth understanding of how organisations operate and what the business objectives are – helping them advise employees and partner with the business.

We’ll help you explore the latest thinking in the subject, starting with first principles of managing people, analysing information and understanding behaviour. From there, you’ll expand into topics like managing across cultures and leading change. And, in your final year, you’ll also be able to pick your own subject as a research topic.

By the time you graduate, you won’t just have extensive knowledge of the role, you’ll also have a deeper understanding of the business and legislative landscape. In other words, you’ll leave ready to start your career in the world of HR.

Product designers at Manchester Met explore why, examine how, and ask ‘what if?’ We are investigative and critically responsive to human and global needs, developing innovative design-led solutions that connect the consumer experience of products, systems and services. As a product design student, you will be creative with purpose, gaining critical understanding of the emergent issues affecting design across society and culture, learning how to be a designer of products that enhance functionality, interactions and relationships with people and the places we inhabit.

 You will develop essential skills in creative methods, research, design thinking, prototyping and design strategy, applying design intelligence to the creation of new product opportunities and solutions. You will discover how to design products that embrace both traditional and contemporary approaches to production and manufacturing, generating value through the application of materials, processes, and technologies. This course will enable you to produce innovative crafted design solutions and develop the creative and professional skills required to support a sustainable career in product design.

Product Design at Manchester Met builds on the success of our previous programme, BA Three Dimensional Design, which has produced influential and award-winning graduates including designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick, jeweller Ruth Tomlinson and ceramicist Joe Hartley.

The impact humans make on the environment has never been so significant, so pressing or so high profile. Governments, researchers and private organisations are still grappling with the potential solutions for global challenges. Our MSc Environmental Practice provides an answer. It’s your chance to look beyond the headlines and explore the scientific, political and practical realities of protecting the environment.

This course is suited to those looking to enhance their environmental science or management backgrounds, and also those from other backgrounds looking to move into the sector and complement their skills with environmental science and with environmental management aspects.

As such, you’ll cover a diverse range of units throughout the course. On one hand, you’ll develop skills in assessing, monitoring and modelling pollution in the air, water and land, as well as measuring ecosystem degradation. On the other, you’ll learn to apply environmental management tools, impact assessment procedures and carbon management methods.

Finally, you’ll also learn about sustainable development principles and environmental policies – and how to evaluate their implementation. This mix of policy, practice and science will take you from the classroom to the field to the lab. While you’ll develop desk-based assessment approaches, explore key concepts and analyse evidence in lectures and seminars, understanding the environment means getting out into the environment.

So, as well as various opportunities for field trips, you’ll get out into the field for a residential course where you’ll conduct an interdisciplinary environmental assessment. To help you develop your practical skills, you’ll learn in an altogether more cutting-edge environment – with high-spec teaching and research labs equipped with state-of-art analytical and computing equipment.

Our BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering degree provides a strong theoretical and practical foundation for those looking to open the door to one of the many career opportunities available to mechanical engineers. With project-based learning throughout, you’ll develop the transferable skills and multidisciplinary awareness that are highly valued in industry.

In your first year, you’ll get a grounding in the fundamental principles of applied mathematics and engineering sciences. What’s more, you’ll also get straight into the practical side of things, with a design-and-build challenge.

You’ll develop scientific and analytical skills as you study specialisms like solid and fluid mechanics, dynamics, thermodynamics and engineering mathematics. And with project work that’s rooted in our research and shaped around industry, you’ll learn how to apply those skills to real-world engineering.

This mechanical engineering degree is accredited by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) on behalf of the Engineering Council for the purposes of fully meeting the academic requirement for registration as an Incorporated Engineer and partly meeting the academic requirement for registration as a Chartered Engineer.

Placement options

All of our degrees offer the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. If you choose to go down this route, your degree will take one year longer, with the third year spent working in industry. These optional placements not only give you the opportunity to develop your core skills and learn about how a business really operates in your industry, but also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work. We offer a range of services to help you find the right placement, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs.

The MA/MFA Performance is an exciting taught masters programme that offers a practical, versatile and interdisciplinary approach to performance-making and training. The programme provides students with an advanced and practical understanding of current performance practices, drawing on a broad range of artistic and theoretical influences. The development of new creative practice is at the core of the programme, as well as how this work might be developed and profiled in a professional context.

Furthermore, MA/MFA Performance also offers students the chance to specialise in either of the distinctive areas of laboratory theatre or contemporary performance, or to combine elements from both with direct experience of a current professional arts context. The experience of these options is fed through a further process of critical and professional contextualisation, before students embark on the creation of their own major projects as the culmination of the degree.

The world of business is full of opportunities. So where do you start? This practical course will help you find your calling in international business with modules ranging from consultancy to enterprise.

BA (Hons) Business Management includes everything you could want from a business degree, from expertise in our research areas of sustainability, strategy, and enterprise to events like our leadership series of guest lectures.

Applied business skills
You’ll learn the theory behind what makes a successful business. We focus heavily on giving you the practical knowledge you’ll need for your career – whether that’s starting your own business or working your way up in a big corporation.

By the end of this course, you should be able to think strategically. You should have an entrepreneurial mindset. And you should have the skills to be a successful manager anywhere in the world.

The new sustainable business
Profits aren’t the only thing driving businesses. We believe you need to conduct business in a sustainable and ethical way to be an effective manager. Our values underpin everything we do here at Manchester Met.

In fact, you’ll live and breathe sustainability while you’re here, studying in the environmentally-friendly business school. You’ll also get to work alongside innovative start-ups at Manchester Met-based Innospace, were we support people with great business ideas and the commitment to turn them into reality.