Aims of the course:
- To improve experienced students' financial confidence and skills
- To enable students to work successfully with finance specialists on significant projects
- To support students considering a career or secondment in finance
Target audience:
This course is for you in your answer to one of these questions is Yes:
- Do you want to collaborate successfully with financial specialists on a significant project?
- Would you benefit from improving your understanding of your small business finances?
- Are you considering a career or secondment in finance?
You will benefit most from this course if you have a minimum of around 40 hours of prior study of finance, or equivalent practical experience.
If you don't already have this level of experience, we recommend that you consider taking one or the other of our 'Essential finance for you' and 'Understanding finance in organisations' courses, or equivalent, before this course. However this is not a requirement, and you are also most welcome to join this course directly, without any prior studies with the Institute.
Learning outcomes:
As a result of the course, within the constraints of the time available, students should be able to:
- Enjoy collaborating with finance colleagues and specialist financial advisors
- Appreciate and improve the financial dimensions of any self-employed work they do
- Learn whether a secondment or career in finance likely to be enjoyable for them
Course content overview:
As a result of the course, participants should be able to: enjoy collaborating with finance colleagues and specialist financial advisors; appreciate and improve the financial dimensions of any self-employed work they do; and learn whether a secondment or career in finance is likely to be enjoyable.
Schedule:
Orientation Week: 23-29 May 2022
Teaching Weeks: 30 May-3 July 2022
Feedback Week: 4-10 July 2022
Orientation Week:
Purpose/Learning outcomes:
By studying this week the students should have:
- Become familiar with navigating around the VLE and from VLE to links and back
- Tested their ability to access files and the web conferencing software and sorted out any problems with the help of the eLearning Helpdesk
- Learnt how to look for, assess and reference internet resources
- Used forums to introduce themselves to other students
- Contributed to a discussion forum to introduce themselves to other students and discuss why they are interested in the course, what they hope to get out their studies, and also to respond to any News items sent out on behalf of tutor
Week 1 Markets and our place in them
Purpose: Gain a sound appreciation of markets, how the capital liabilities of organisations are assets in financial markets, and why communication with markets is so important. By studying this week the students should have:
- Understood the interaction of perceptions of organisational risk with the market mechanism.
- Appreciated how organisations’ capital instruments are originated, and transacted in the market.
- Understood the fundamental importance of appropriate communication with the market.
- Attempted the related self assessment quiz questions on the VLE.
- Contributed constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Week 2 Shareholder value and other stakeholders
Purpose: Grasp the fundamentally important concept of shareholder value, and its relationship with the interests of other stakeholders in organisations. By studying this week the students should have:
- Understood the key concept of shareholder value, its measurement and management.
- Appreciated the perspectives of other stakeholders in organisations.
- Understood how organisations and authorities seek to reconcile the interests of different stakeholder groups.
- Attempted the related self assessment quiz questions on the VLE.
- Contributed constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Week 3 Making better friends with spreadsheets
Purpose: Further improve the reliability and speed of your spreadsheet work to support and deepen understanding of shareholder value, risk management and the presentation of proposals. By studying this week the students should have:
- Applied some of the enormous potential of spreadsheets to increase the speed, reliability and presentation of financial work.
- Increased their use of spreadsheets native functionality.
- Applied data table and chart analysis.
- Increased their use of the keyboard when appropriate, in place of the mouse.
- Attempted the related self assessment quiz questions on the VLE.
- Contributed constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Week 4 Risk management
Purpose: Gain comfort and confidence with risk identification, risk management and risk reporting. By studying this week students should have:
- Appreciated the meaning and importance of risk identification, risk management and risk reporting.
- Worked with selected measures of risk.
- Applied their understanding to a mini case study.
- Integrated this understanding with their work in the first three weeks of the course.
- Contributed constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Week 5 - Getting your proposals accepted
Purpose: Appreciate how to optimise the analysis and presentation of their proposals to maximimise the prospects for acceptance. Apply this understanding in a self-chosen case study. By studying this week the students should have:
- Deepened their appreciation of the reasons why financial decision makers need detailed information about operational proposals, presented in conventional ways.
- Connected their understanding with their learning from Weeks 1 to 4 of the course.
- Applied their deeper and broader appreciation of these concepts to a self-chosen case study.
- Contributed constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Week 6 - Feedback
Purpose:
•Assessment of student learning, including optional personal action plans and accountability process
•Assessment of student satisfaction
•Encouragement of further study
Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours reading material, etc., although this will vary from person to person.
While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material).
Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place through a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (discussion boards,etc).
A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.
