Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Business Management (Marketing) with Placement Year

at University of Westminster - Marylebone Campus United Kingdom

Do you have the ideas, imagination and creativity to spot market opportunities, predict the next big thing and develop engaging communications that cut across the thousands of marketing messages that bombard us 24/7? As advancements in technology generate new marketing channels and trends, businesses are increasingly turning to marketing experts for answers, which is why you’ll find marketing and advertising on almost every list of the fastest growing industries worldwide.

Long gone are the days when traditional marketing was dominated by sales and advertising linked to traditional print and broadcast media. Today’s modern marketing relies on market research and consumer insights, databases and information systems, digital communications, advanced geo-demographic segmentation and a deep understanding of buyer psychology and behaviour. That’s why you’ll find all this and more on our exciting degree, which is continually reviewed to keep up with the fast pace of change in this field.

You’ll cover every aspect of marketing, from costing campaigns and managing marketing budgets to creating a new business, generating market intelligence or developing a new product development strategy. Acknowledging the importance of digital techniques and social media marketing, you’ll have access to our new digital marketing lab, Switch 23, which is set up to mimic a creative agency. It features a large touch screen and individual workstations that students can connect to, using laptops and mobile phones to present their campaigns.

You’ll also relate your learning to real-world marketing practice during a range of exciting field trips and project-based work. Past students have studied tourism marketing in Paris, the most popular city in France, while closer to home, others were tasked with creating a marketing campaign to promote the Tower of London. Expect to be given tasks based on real-life projects, such as developing the marketing plan to launch a small, independent hotel, as an example.

Past graduates within the Business School have found successful employment as management, marketing and advertising trainees, as trainee accountants and brand managers, recruitment consultants, retail managers and as assistants in market research, PR and global brand.

Our course was designed with input from a range of industry professionals from industry sectors including– retail, public relations, marketing, pharmaceuticals, government and the NHS.

Career-focused, our degree incorporates general business management as well as the tools, techniques and specialist knowledge to manage human resources (HR) effectively. You will put theory into practice coaching other students, designing assessments, conducting interviews and more. This provides valuable experience and a genuine appreciation of how HR fits within the broader business landscape, preparing you to make a positive impact for your employer from the get-go.

How an organisation manages its people has a direct impact on both their mindset and productivity, making HR Management (HRM) a core function in every business. This course will equip you with the breadth of knowledge, skills and capabilities to develop positive working cultures and respond proactively and creatively to contemporary business issues and challenges, such as change management.

Our emphasis is very much on experiential learning. You will be taught by staff who are or have been HR professionals, bringing their real-life case work into the classroom, showing you how the HR theories, tools and techniques you are learning can be put into practice. You will also hear direct from industry practitioners, such as experienced HR Directors, Heads of HR and HR Consultants. Where possible, we also take you on field trips to see HR strategy in action at a range of different organisations.

Your learning is fully informed by current professional practice and you will be encouraged to act as an HR professional from day one. We will introduce contemporary tools and techniques and give you the chance to gain the practical experience you would in work – sometimes several years into a career – while you study. For example, you will experiment with psychometric tests such as Myers Briggs Type Indicator, participate in mock disciplinary hearings, interview panels, act as a mentor and receive mentoring yourself. In doing so, you also develop valuable transferable skills, such as communicating effectively, team-working and problem-solving skills, thereby enhancing your employability.

Past graduates have found successful employment as an HR advisor, HR operations assistant, career consultant, professional development and training advisor and employee service advisor. They work for major employers including Accenture, Hilton Hotels and Resorts, Trainline, The Body Shop, Waitrose, the Metropolitan Police and the NHS.

The expansion of new media technologies and sophisticated customer profiling – covering everything from media consumption to recreational preferences – have increased the choice and importance of creative decisions in marketing strategy. Developed with input from current ‘marcomms’ practitioners, our professionally-focused degree will equip you with the creative and specialist knowledge, skills and capabilities to select the right media channels and craft the most effective messages.

You can also boost your employability by gaining additional qualifications with the Institute of Data and Marketing (IDM) and/or the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). Our status as a CIM Graduate Gateway institution entitles you to apply for exemptions from modules on its professional qualifications, while you can gain IDM’s Award in Digital Marketing during the Digital Marketing Essentials module.

Top reasons to study with us

• Professionally-focused course with chance to gain additional professional qualifications from the Institute of Data and Marketing (IDM) and the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)
• Digital Marketing Essentials module incorporates content for IDM Award in Digital Marketing and the final-year Direct and Interactive Marketing module provides opportunity to gain the IDM Diploma in Digital Marketing
• Marketing degrees share a common first year, giving greater flexibility when choosing your specialism
• Option to spend one semester or one year studying abroad at one of our partner institutions, gain valuable work experience, or a combination of both. For example, one previous student worked as a marketing executive for ICG Medical
• Opportunity to study a foreign language as an optional module in each year of study
• Hear from experts and mingle with marketing students by joining the student-run Westminster Marketing Society or gain experience working for the student-run Westminster Business Consultants
• Optional placement year to gain valuable work experience, for example, one of our previous students spent six months working as a podcast assistant for MailOnline, while another worked at IBM
• Guest lectures from industry practitioners have previously included speakers on Google analytics and from organisations such as IBM, Tableau, Coca Cola and LinkedIn
• Programmes are delivered by a multicultural and international teaching body, who come from professional practice and/or regularly publish in top international journals

The growth in global construction is fuelling the demand for professional quantity surveyors and construction commercial managers who can take a holistic view of construction projects – overseeing costs, contractual and procurement matters – from inception to completion. Our project-based approach to learning exposes you to live and past construction projects from the outset, preparing you to accurately predict and control project costs.

This professionally focused degree will prepare you to confidently and effectively manage the commercial aspects of building and civil engineering projects across the property and construction industries. Whether you’re already working in construction or looking to enter the industry, you can start your journey to becoming a certified quantity surveyor or commercial manager.

Fully accredited by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE), it will equip you with the professional and technical skills to ensure projects are delivered on time, to the required quality and within budget. This involves early cost planning, procurement evaluation, tendering, estimating, contractual routes, project cost control and commercial management.

Our central London location and numerous industry contacts, which include Great Portland Estates, Mace, Lendlease, The Portman Estate, Wilmott Dixon, Multiplex, Transport for London and The Crown Estate, enable us to invite practising professionals to give guest lectures and regularly contribute to the course. They provide buildings as case studies for coursework, learning materials (drawings, reports, clients briefs etc.) and come into the University to give face-to-face formative feedback on students’ work. We aim to create authentic learning activities to ensure you are business-ready for employment or can further progress in your existing careers.

Our construction courses share a common ‘Level 4’; the first year of the full-time course or the first two years if studying part-time. Shared core modules allow you to gain knowledge of the different professional roles and the interdisciplinary nature of the modern construction industry. At the end of the Level 4, you’ll be better placed to choose the course-specific modules in later years of study that emphasise the knowledge and skills for your chosen profession. It also means that, should your interests change, you can switch course.

Sound and ethical financial management lies at the heart of every successful business: to generate sufficient income, optimise resources, reduce risk and gain a good return on investments. On this course, you’ll learn to strategically plan, organise, direct and control finances in a rapidly evolving global financial sector.

Our Finance and Business Management degree has been purposefully designed to meet the educational requirements of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (CISI). Although exemptions are not available, our Course will provide you with the necessary set of skills to sit several professional exams.

With an emphasis on learning through practice, it provides a solid foundation of finance theories, systems and procedures, developing your skills for complex modelling and analysis. Gaining a greater appreciation of strategic financial decision-making with a specific focus on ethics and sustainability, you’ll be prepared for a fast track and rewarding career in the international financial services sector or in management.

You will learn to analyse financial markets to forecast financial performance, using real data – live and historic – in our Finance Markets Suite (FMS) with its replica trading floor. You’ll also hear directly from current professionals through guest speakers, field trips to financial institutions and professional training sessions.

Business School graduates have gone on to work for large banks and other financial institutions, including Vanguard, Standard Chartered, Citibank, Société Générale and Paribas, and governmental agencies, such as the World Economic Forum.

Setting you apart in a competitive job market, you’ll graduate with direct experience from a three-month internship and the holistic business knowledge, capabilities and cutting-edge digital expertise demanded by today’s employers.

In the fast-moving global business environment, employers demand multi-skilled, digitally competent graduates with a sophisticated understanding of business and its changing context, one which cuts across the traditional business disciplines that include human resources, management and marketing. To succeed you need a ‘big picture’ approach. You must be capable of adapting to emerging business models, creating new enterprises, leading and managing people effectively and improving processes with digital solutions.

At Westminster Business School, we recognise that future business professionals need the full range of technical and personal development skills – more responsible, resilient, adaptable and versatile than ever before. Our aim is to help you become an aspiring leader and entrepreneur, someone who can add value to any type of organisation. But we believe it’s essential for this transformation process to start early, before you have extensive working experience or have adopted the mindset of one particular employer or business sector. By starting this process early, it’s much easier to develop your skills, learn to think outside the box, and independently lead changes in the business world – wherever your career takes you. It’s also what our employer contacts tell us they’d prefer.

Whether you consider yourself an ideas person, innovator or problem-solver, our exciting degree brings together the creative and analytical aspects of marketing to offer a hands-on experience of creating, managing and measuring the impact of an online brand.

Digital marketing is fast becoming one of the most important skills demanded by employers, as business is increasingly conducted online by digital brands and traditional players alike.

Our broad curriculum pulls together the many different strands of digital marketing – understanding user channels, stages of the customer journey, how to engage customers, drive traffic to websites, search engine optimisation, paid advertising, how to build a social media following and increase conversion through email sign-up or sales.

You will have the opportunity to tailor your course by choosing specialist option modules, covering topics like user experience, brand management, mobile and social media.

You’ll learn to build, focus and measure digital marketing messages and content to achieve the greatest effect on behalf of a brand, organisation or cause, using these same skills to manage your own professional presence online. In doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to develop and present your content ideas for campaigns, websites and apps in Switch 23, a collaborative digital marketing lab, which features the same Adobe Creative Cloud applications used in top agencies.

Top reasons to study with us

• Access to our dedicated digital marketing lab, Switch 23, using the same Adobe Creative Cloud applications used in top agencies
• Emphasis on real-world learning – you’ll engage with industry, working on real problems set in partnership with businesses and marketing agencies
• Focus on practice-based assessment with flexible final project of a dissertation or consultancy report that plays to your strengths and interests
• Optional placement or international year to gain valuable work experience. For example, one previous marketing student spent six months working as a podcast assistant for MailOnline, while another worked at IBM
• Hear from experts and mingle with marketing students by joining the student-run Westminster Marketing Society or gain experience working for the student-run Westminster Business Consultants (WBC)

Our Tourism and Events Management BA explores the relationship between tourism, events and the wider environment, developing the skills you need to successfully evaluate and manage tourism and stage events in host destinations. The course is designed for students who have an interest in the tourism sector generally and are keen to focus on the dynamic field of events management. The course is designed to provide a combination of the practical elements of events management with an in-depth understanding of the potential impacts of events and their role in developing destination product and destination image. The course takes an international perspective and includes a field trip in each year of study. 

The course provides a thorough grounding in the subject and the theoretical principles that underpin tourism and event policy and management, but also has a strong emphasis on skills development for the workplace, including presentation skills, research, data analysis, budgeting, negotiation and content planning. Each student is allocated a personal tutor for academic guidance and pastoral care.

The MArch is a long-established and well-respected course that is prescribed by the ARB and validated by the RIBA to give exemption from the second stage of professional education. The emphasis of the course is on innovative design work, and on developing a caring and critical approach to the study and practice of architecture.

The course fosters diversity of choice, interpretation and approach, whether in design projects or more academic research. The former focuses on sophisticated design programmes (in formal, technical, professional or urban terms) that demand rigour and self-criticism. The latter focuses on your major dissertation, an extended piece of specialised research into architecture and its historical or theoretical contexts.

The course has three main objectives: to develop your design ability through project-based experimentation; to present an evaluation and critique of your coursework within a broad cultural context, and in light of technical, economic and legal constraints; and to promote the articulate explanation and representation of quality and value in design projects.

The Tourism Planning and Management BA focuses on the planning, development, management, and regeneration of destinations.

Tourism continues to be a major component of the global economy and has now become an established academic discipline, with roots in geography, economics, sociology, planning and business.

The University of Westminster has over 20 years of expertise in tourism education and research, and we are consistently ranked as one of the top universities for teaching quality and research output in the discipline. Our long history, dating back to the 1830s, includes a significant association with the early years of tour operating in Europe, and with the Olympic Games held in London in 1908 and 1948.

Located in the heart of London, we offer an unrivalled and stimulating environment in which to study tourism. We have close links with partner universities in Australia, the USA, Hong Kong and Malta, which in the past have given several students the opportunity to study abroad for one semester.

You can choose to take part in an optional year-long work placement module between years 2 and 3 (Levels 5 and 6). This is a further opportunity to enhance your transferable skills, commercial awareness and professionalism – increasing your future employability in the tourism sector.

This course is recognised by the Tourism Management Institute (the UK’s professional organisation for destination management) for the excellence of its content and is delivered in collaboration with our Department of Planning and Transport.