Master of Science in International Development Management

at University of Westminster - Marylebone Campus United Kingdom

Whether caused by politics, environmental issues or world health crises, the global economy is ever changing and of growing concern to businesses. Monitoring and predicting the impact of economics on business is now a top priority, raising the demand for graduates who understand how markets work and how local and international issues can affect competition and performance.

Combining the study of economics with general business management, this degree is designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge to analyse individual company and industry performance within the context of global economics. Using live and historical data in our state-of-the-art Financial Markets Suite (FMS), you’ll apply economic theory and practice to real-world businesses, learning how to plan, evaluate economic trends and become better placed to help firms make effective business decisions. 

To help you support future business and management decisions, we’ll examine how and why businesses emerge, exist and expand – studying their global environment, relationship and interactions with employees, providers of capital, customers, competitors, government and other regulatory bodies. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the economic, qualitative and quantitative techniques and ideas used to analyse and solve business problems in a global marketplace. 

Taught by academics with substantial business experience across the range of business disciplines, through consultancy or knowledge exchange, there is an emphasis on learning through practice, so you graduate with the breadth of knowledge and capabilities to respond proactively and creatively to contemporary business issues and challenges. Throughout the course, you’ll also develop a range of transferrable skills highly prized by employers, such as critical evaluation, self-direction and problem-solving, as well as a sound grasp of analysis, presentations and negotiation techniques.

You’ll be capable of holding positions of significant responsibility and authority in public companies, private businesses and government agencies. Past Business Management graduates 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 branding.

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.

Economists tackle anything from interpreting and forecasting market trends or individual business performance by country, region or market, to advising businesses, governments and individuals on everyday and strategic decisions. These can encompass areas as diverse as international trade, profit maximisation, pricing decisions, forecasting revenues or consumer demand, to managing the national health service, tackling unemployment or inequality.

You’ll learn to analyse and predict the impact of economic, social and public policy issues on a variety of stakeholders, including consumers, investors, businesses, and how to source and provide the most appropriate insight to inform future decision-making and strategy.

As the role of data in informing decision-making grows, this degree expands your crucial skills in data gathering, handling and interpretation, quantitative analysis and forecasting. You will use industry-standard software, including SPSS, Excel,Eviews, Minitab and other statistical packages, to analyse data, build models and produce forecasts. You will also develop key soft skills such as communicating complex economic ideas to a non-expert, a logical approach to formulating and solving problems, presentation skills and teamwork.

Our highly flexible business degree is designed for those who want to thrive in a rapidly changing global, cultural and technological business world. You’ll develop the versatility, vision and wisdom that future business leaders and managers need.

With an emphasis on learning through practice, you will develop the breadth of knowledge, skills and capabilities to respond proactively and creatively to contemporary business issues and challenges. A large range of optional modules – covering everything from brands and business ethics to entertainment and sport – means you can tailor your studies each year.

You’ll also hear direct from industry practitioners, who will share their own experience of, for example, incorporating the principles of the circular economy in their businesses.

You will be encouraged to adopt an enquiring and critical approach to ideas and issues, developing the graduate attributes that employers value. For example, when learning how to evaluate company performance in sustainability, you will be tasked with investigating the big picture through news and contemporary journals, rather than relying solely on a company’s PR. You’ll also gain hands-on experience of common business computing and software, including Tableau Data Visualisation, FAME and the Microsoft Office suite.

All of this will help develop the necessary confidence and business acumen to set up your own business or contribute proactively to private business, public or ‘third’ sector organisations. Past graduates 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.

Building surveying offers an exciting, dynamic profession focused on the physical, functional and economic performance of buildings – new builds, building control, refurbishment work, restorations, maintenance and design.

Fully accredited by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE), our degree aims to equip you with the professional and technical skills and knowledge needed to become a building surveyor.

You may be called on to report and advise on the condition of various property assets, identifying defects and structural problems, designing, specifying and administrating refurbishment projects or interpreting the meaning of 'repairing obligations' in a lease, for example. You could go on to work in private practice, the public sector, building control, property management or the conservation of historic buildings.

Our construction courses share a common first year, allowing you to gain knowledge of the different professional roles and the interdisciplinary nature of the modern construction industry. At the end of the second year, should your interests change, it's possible to switch pathway. You’ll mix with students from across the various pathways, broadening your social circles and networks, and be taught by our professionally qualified lecturers, who will share their experience of working in the property, construction and surveying sectors prior to joining academia.

Our central London location and numerous industry contacts, which include Great Portland Estates, Mace, Lendlease, The Portman Estate 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, client 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.

Incorporating the latest digital and analytic marketing practices, the broad curriculum of our Master’s degree reflects the rapidly changing global marketing environment. Whilst at Westminster, you can also secure two internationally-recognised professional qualifications – the Institute of Data and Marketing (IDM) Certificate in Digital Marketing and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Global Foundation Certificate, as well as joining the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR).

Here at Westminster, we’ve been teaching postgraduate degrees in marketing communications for over 20 years. Our goal is to prepare you for professional life in the increasingly complex and dynamic marketing communications industry, incorporating the growing content of digital marketing and new innovations.

This exciting specialist accounting degree is designed specifically to meet the needs of a talent pool for the changing accounting services sector. Education in this subject area is in high demand in a wide variety of sectors and industries where accounting specialists manage budgets, prepare financial and annual reports and also are involved at Board level to inform the development of strategy and guide business decisions. Our degree is the first step to becoming a qualified accounting professional with potential to develop a rewarding career in large and small firms as a consultant or in a business start-up.

This professionally accredited degree offers a rounded business education designed to develop your understanding of accounting theories and practice, together with the business acumen, team-working, problem-solving, communication skills and the commercial awareness needed in a complex global financial world.

Raising your awareness of the global, social and ethical professional environment within which the accounting profession operates, you’ll learn to appreciate accounting issues within the wider business context, able to guide decisions on anything from cost-cutting and outsourcing to operational planning and environmental policy, for example.

Taught by academics with professional experience as accountants and managers, there is an emphasis on learning through practice, so you graduate with the breadth of knowledge and capabilities to respond proactively and creatively to contemporary business issues and challenges. You’ll develop practical skills, receiving hands-on training in specialist accounting software such as Sage, Bloomberg and SPSS. In our state-of-the-art Financial Markets Suite (FMS), you’ll also have access to live and historical financial reports, experiencing the same Bloomberg platform used by leading global investment banks.

Changes in technology and regulation mean that the accounting industry is constantly evolving. On our course, you’ll have the chance to focus your studies from the start, blending a conceptual theoretical framework with practical 'real-world' application as the curriculum progresses from basic to more specialised and advanced applications. Upon completion, you will be part-qualified, eligible to apply up to nine exemptions with ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) and up eight exemptions with CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants).

Our programme will equip you with the required skills and attributes needed for an engaging and successful career in accounting or related fields in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. It will assist you in developing excellent conceptual knowledge and technical skills in financial accounting, management accounting, corporate finance, taxation, auditing, and financial analysis, as well as the required attributes to excel in the modern global business environment. Past graduates have gone on to a range of accounting and other professional posts in the private and public sectors, including ACCA and Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) training contracts, and finance posts in the public sector.

Responsive to trends and issues in global financial services industries, our MSc Finance (Banking pathway) degree aims to equip you with the advanced skills to pursue careers in retail, commercial and private banking as a loan officer, private banker, private wealth consultant or to work within the back and middle offices of an investment bank, in risk management, administrative or support services. It combines a broad range of topics, including finance, economics, quantitative methods and big data analysis.

Study with us and, on successful completion, Finance (Banking) MSc students will receive Associate Chartered Banker status with the Chartered Banker Institute. This is the first step on the ladder for professional recognition as Chartered Banker, the gold standard for professionals working in the banking sector.

You'll study a common first semester providing a solid introduction to financial markets, institutions and intermediaries, and the function of banks in relation to these. This allows you to make a more informed choice about your specialist pathway (in Banking or International Finance) for the second semester, where you delve more into retail and investment banking, choosing options according to your interests, for example, in banking technology, compliance or behavioural finance.

In today’s fast-paced global business environment, strategic marketing influences every aspect of business, informing decisions about how to create and maintain consumer demand, increase profit, build reputation and stay ahead of the competition. Incorporating the latest digital and analytic marketing practices, our Master’s reflects the ever-changing nature of this exciting profession.

Internationalisation and digitisation have fundamentally shifted marketing contexts: types of businesses, products and services, channels and communication media, and consumer behaviour are changing rapidly. Businesses of all shapes and sizes – large or small, global or local, innovative or traditional, public or private – now compete for the same market. Marketing professionals can steer a company toward success through innovative product development, savvy pricing strategies, creative communications and timely market insight.

The aim of both the MA and MSc is to improve your managerial effectiveness in the increasingly digitised, automated and globalised field of marketing. It will deepen your understanding of the relationship between marketing and the wider organisation, as well as the organisation and its customers, enabling you to adopt a holistic forward-looking approach to marketing to achieve long-term sustainable competitive advantage.

Tourism is an increasingly important part of our lives, and the tourism industry is one of the few global industries forecast to grow in the long term. Managing this rapidly growing industry to meet visitors' demands in a sustainable way is exciting and challenging. This long-established course will give you the knowledge, analytical abilities and skills you need to make a career as a tourism professional.

You will study at the heart of London, one of the world's leading tourism destinations. Site visits, integrated in the course modules, will allow you to explore a wide variety of aspects of the dynamic tourism industry.

Annual student feedback for the course is very positive, with teaching, staff contract and course content receiving particular praise. This reflects the tourism team's efforts to provide a valuable and effective course as well as a supportive, friendly and stimulating environment for your studies.

Members of the teaching team have published academic texts used by students of tourism at many UK universities.  You will benefit from access to these texts – and the insights of these authors.  Furthermore, staff teaching on the course are active researchers, and their teaching is informed by both their own research and their engagement with industry.