Aims of the course
- To raise participant's financial awareness, confidence and skills.
- To enable participants to engage more successfully with finance specialists.
- To support students considering a career or secondment in finance.
Target audience
This course is for you if you answer 'yes' to any one of these questions:
- Would your personal finances benefit from more understanding and attention?
- Do you interact with finance specialists, but not always fully understand them?
- Are you considering a career or secondment in finance?
No prior knowledge is required or assumed.
This course is at an entry level compared with our intermediate course 'Understanding Finance in Organisations' , and our most advanced course 'Financial decision-making in practice'.
However, you are 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 objectives
- Improve your personal financial situation by applying selected insights from the course.
- Enjoy greatly improved interactions with financial specialists.
- Determine whether a secondment or career in finance is appropriate for you.
Schedule (this course is completed entirely online)
Orientation Week: 16-22 February 2026
Teaching Weeks: 23 February-29 March 2026
Feedback Week: 30 March-5 April 2026
Teaching Week 1 - Why it pays to increase your financial wordpower
Purpose: To gain a sound appreciation of the importance of the specialist language of finance and the need to translate it into practical and jargon-free insights. Create a dynamic personal system to record, link, apply and expand this broadening and deepening understanding.
Learning objectives:
- To appreciate the fundamental importance of identifying and defining financial concepts.
- To recognise that many common words have specialised meanings in finance.
- To recognise that financial terms may mean different things in different contexts.
- To identify and explain relevant examples.
- To create an appropriate expandable personal register of the concepts your are learning, concise definitions, and notes of your significance for your own professional work or personal finance.
Teaching Week 2 - Capital and Capitalism
Purpose: To grasp the fundamental importance of capital as a factor of production, and the role and legitimate perspectives of the providers of capital in the economy and society.
Learning objectives:
- To appreciate the meaning and importance of capital.
- To explain why capitalism considers that the providers of capital are entitled to benefits.
- To identify and explain relevant examples.
- To add these and related concepts to your personal register of financial concepts, including the significance for your own work or personal finances, or both.
Teaching Week 3 - Assets, liabilities, net worth and equity
Purpose: To develop a sound understanding of why all financial assets for one person are also financial liabilities for another, and connect this essential insight with the important financial concepts of net worth and equity.
Learning objectives:
- To understand the meaning and importance of assets and liabilities.
- To appreciate that every financial asset is also a financial liability, and why this is so important.
- To identify the meaning and importance of net worth and equity, the relationship between each of them, and their relationship with assets and liabilities.
- To produce and explain relevant examples.
- To add these concepts to your personal register with the significance for your own work or personal finances, or both.
- To identify a maximum of three personal action points from their work on the course to date, and note them in your personal register, together with targeted completion dates.
Teaching Week 4 - Interest and financial returns
Purpose: To gain comfort and confidence about interest and rates of return, including simple calculations and qualitative appreciation of directions of influence in more complex situations.
Learning objectives:
- To appreciate the meaning and importance of interest, rates of interest, return and rates of return, including the relationship between these important concepts.
- To successfully undertake simple calculations of interest and return.
- To understand the significance of compound interest and return.
- To appreciate how rates of return can be calculated from forecast and historic cash flows and their timing.
- To add these and related concepts to your register of financial concepts, including your personal significance.
Teaching Week 5 - Risk and financial risk
Purpose: To introduce the fundamentally important concept of financial risk, connect it with general and personal insights from Weeks 1 to 4 of the course, and identify key personal action points.
Learning objectives:
- To understand the meaning and importance of risk and financial risk, and the relationship between them.
- To appreciate the relationship between risk and expected financial returns.
- To chose appropriately between simplified case study alternative investments.
- To understand the potential benefits of diversification, and also its limitations.
- To add these concepts to your register with their your personal significance.
- To identify a maximum of three additional personal action points from your work on the course to date, and noted them in your personal register, together with target completion dates and an accountability process.
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 one-hour 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, 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.
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 level of detail in both the content and discussion forums was outstanding. Prior to this course, there had been aspects within finance which I had struggled with (such as interest rates), but Doug explained it so thoroughly and in depth that now I feel confident in discussing and attempting them. The content, layout and progression of the course was also presented in an enjoyable format which created interest and allowed for deeper understanding."
"Thank you kindly Doug for being dedicated to ensure that the contents of this course are well understood by your students. I really appreciated all of the additional information you provided to further our knowledge and go in depth into certain topics. I learned much more than anticipated in this class."
"This has been my first virtual learning experience and has exceeded by far all my expectations."
"Thank you Doug for your excellent tutorship within this course. Your personalised learning experiences has made it an incredibly educative and enjoyable process. I have gained not only a better understanding of the basics of personal finance but also a higher level of confidence when it comes to approaching what were once daunting calculations now made simple. "
