Aims of the course
- To improve relatively experienced participants' financial confidence and skills.
- To enable participants to work successfully with finance specialists on significant projects.
- To support participants considering a career or secondment in finance.
Target audience
This course is for you if your answer to one or more 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 small business finances?
- Are you considering a career or secondment in finance?
No prior knowledge or experience of finance is assumed or required.
This course is at a relatively advanced level compared with our introductory course 'Essential finance', and our intermediate level course 'Understanding finance in organisations'. However, you are warmly welcome to follow these courses in any order that suits your personal schedule. Many participants have followed two - or all three - of these courses in different orders.
Learning outcomes
The course will offer participants the opportunity to:
- Enjoy collaborating with finance colleagues and specialist finance advisors.
- Appreciate and improve the financial dimensions of any self-employed work they do.
- Learn whether a secondment or career in finance is likely to be enjoyable for them.
- Get more of their proposals approved by financial specialist decision-makers.
Schedule (this course is completed entirely online)
Orientation Week: 19-25 February 2024
Teaching Weeks: 26 February-31 March 2024
Feedback Week: 1-7 April 2024
Teaching Week 1 - Markets and our place in them
Purpose: To 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.
Learning objectives:
- To understand the interaction of perceptions or organisational risk with the market mechanism.
- To appreciate how organisations' capital instruments are originated, and transacted in the market.
- To understand the fundamental importance of appropriate communication with the market.
- To attempt related self-assessment learning activities on the VLE.
- Contribute constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Teaching Week 2 - Shareholder value and other stakeholders
Purpose: To grasp the fundamentally important concept of shareholder value, and its relationship with the interests of other stakeholders in organisations.
Learning objectives:
- To understand the key concept of shareholder value, its measurement and management.
- To appreciate the perspectives of other stakeholders in organisations.
- To understand how organisations and authorities seek to reconcile the interests of different stakeholder groups.
- To attempt the related self-assessment learning activities on the VLE.
- To contribute constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Teaching Week 3 - Making better friends with spreadsheets
Purpose: To further improve the reliability and speed of your spreadsheet work to support and deepen your understanding of shareholder value, risk management and the presentation of proposals.
Learning objectives:
- To apply some of the enormous potential of spreadsheets to increase the speed, reliability and presentation of financial work.
- To increase the use of spreadsheets native functionality.
- To apply data table and chart analysis.
- To increase use of the keyboard when appropriate, in place of the mouse or trackpad.
- To attempt the related self-assessment learning activities on the VLE.
- To contribute constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Teaching Week 4 - Risk management
Purpose: To gain comfort and confidence with risk identification, risk management and risk reporting.
Learning objectives:
- To appreciate the meaning and importance of risk identification, risk management and risk reporting.
- To work with selected measures of risk.
- To apply your understanding to a mini case study.
- To integrate this understanding with your work in the first three weeks of the course.
- To contribute constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Teaching Week 5 - Getting your proposals accepted
Purpose: To appreciate how to optimise the analysis and presentation of your proposals to maximise the prospects for acceptance. To apply this understanding in a self-chosen case study.
Learning objectives:
- To deepen your appreciation of the reasons why financial decision makers need detailed information about operational proposals, presented in conventional ways.
- To connect your understanding with your learning from weeks 1 to 5 of the course.
- To apply your deeper and broader appreciation of these concepts to a self-chosen case study.
- To contribute constructively to the related discussions on the VLE.
Study commitment and Certificate
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.
There will be an optional interactive 1 hr webinar each week. All webinars will be recorded and shared on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, and week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and this course does not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of day.
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).
Certificate of Participation
A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.
What our students say
"The courses have been structured in a way to support learners coming from very different backgrounds. The weekly topics were comprehensive, the language very clear and understandable. The forum chats and the weekly webinar gave me the chance to easily interact with the other participants, share opinions, ask questions, and gave me the feeling to be part of a class, which I greatly appreciate. Special credit goes to the tutor, Doug Williamson, whose enthusiasm has created a very positive and questioning atmosphere. He answered all our questions, provided multiple additional resources to allow us to go more in depth into some of the topics, and made the learning experience very enjoyable."
"I found Doug very approachable and friendly to work with. He is always in a positive mood with a good sense of humour. Whenever I had questions or wanted to discuss anything with him he would always get back to me in very quick time with great resources to share which I greatly appreciated."
"The course was well structured with technical concepts translated into simple language and easy format. There is a section focusing on using excel sheets for financial modelling, basics that could help anyone with their personal or organisational finance. I found the inclusion of the personal project - developing a financial model cum value proposition for any business idea of our choice - very useful, nicely collating all the information in the earlier sections."
