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Business

Set yourself up for the professional world

Key Information

Whether you’re a numbers-person or a people-person, our Pathway in Business prepares you to understand business locally and globally. With instructors and students from all over the world, what better place to understand our global market than the award-winning business school in ARU Chelmsford and Cambridge.

Key information

Undergraduate course

Duration

  • Foundation (4 Years)
  • Foundation (3 years for accelerated courses)
  • First Year (3 Years)
  • First Year (2 years for accelerated courses)

Intakes

  • January
  • May
  • September

Location

  • Cambridge
    Chelmsford

Business overview

Do you want to own your own business, be a consultant or manager, market new and interesting products? Whatever the end goal, a foundation in Business will help students understand real-world application of business theory and strategy.

Our Pathway in Business begins by helping you understand the basics needed in any business industry and a variety of intercultural situations. Based in Cambridge and Chelmsford, you’ll interact with businesses and get inspired by guest speakers like our ‘Be Your Own Boss’ Seminar series. Our business school has many opportunities to begin implementing your ideas, even before you graduate with many industry contacts and ARU’s Big Pitch business idea competition.

Here is the place to set yourself up for the professional world.

Pathway progression

Successful completion of this pathway will lead to the award of the following from Anglia Ruskin University:

Please see our International and UK course matrix for entry point, intake and study location information.

Foundation Course structure

Interactive Learning Skills and Communication (ILSC)

Interactive Learning Skills and Communication (ILSC) will help you to develop your academic, research, communication, and literacy skills in preparation for your undergraduate degree. ILSC covers reading, writing, speaking, and listening and will give you an understanding of institutional culture, practices, norms, and expectations of UK higher education. You will develop transferable skills such as effective communication to support ongoing study, career, and professional development skills.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

Information Communication Technology (ICT) provides you with the practical computer skills needed for university. In this module, you will cover fundamental topics surrounding the use of technology and discuss these together with societal and ethical perspectives. This will allow you to reflect on and discuss the main challenges facing society and consider the implications of your technology use. This module requires no previous technical experience and will introduce you to practical ICT skills that will be needed for academic success across many areas of higher education. By the end, you should have sufficient proficiency in the Microsoft Office productivity suite for planning and producing presentations, using functions, and writing formula to display, formatting and analysing quantitative data, and producing written assignments to a standard appropriate to higher education.

Critical Thinking

This module aims to enable you to participate in and practice independent learning tasks for deeper thought and investigation as needed for Higher Academic pursuits. You will participate in a Socratic Discussion based around Conspiracy Theories and Source Checking to encourage presentation and debating skills. You will be encouraged to invest in strategies that will deepen understanding and interpretation of processes, motives, argument, rationale, credibility, and possibilities which will then be applicable to a range of studies. You will also undertake research, based on an issue related to your degree programme, to review the main points of examining an argument in depth. You will then learn to create a personal response that analyses the content of the issue under study.

Core Maths

Core Maths has been designed to ensure you will have the necessary basic numeracy skills needed for university. Within this module, you will practice various mathematical manipulations and apply these concepts to real-life situations, to indicate the importance and applicability of mathematics to your future degrees. You will study a wide range of core mathematics including arithmetic skills, algebra, solving equations, probability, and basic statistics, all of which will be extremely beneficial for supporting you in your studies.

Ethics

Ethics is all about making decisions based on what you consider to be correct and not correct which is a discipline that is fundamental for students in higher education. Within this module, you will discuss the complexity of ethical theory and will investigate the status of several major ethical theories and claims and consider some practical ethical issues which are impacted by these theories. You will be encouraged to use critical thinking and research to discuss descriptive, normative, and analytic approaches to ethical problems and you will also look at how ethics is applied within the humanities, technology, business, medical and legal contexts.

Intercultural Studies

Intercultural Studies explores differences between cultures and subcultures around the world. Within this module, you will draw from your own cultural experiences as well as learning from other people and lecturer-led case studies. The aim of this module is to increase your awareness and help you to further develop an understanding toward other cultures and value systems. You will gain the skills required to explore and articulate comparisons between different cultural practices, institutions, beliefs, and analytical frameworks.

Business Law

This module has been designed to present you with some of the fundamental aspects of Business Law. You will be introduced to legal concepts and rules and the machinery involved in their introduction, application, and enforcement. You will explore and critically assess the value of legal rules, processes, and institutions and will cover topics such as: intellectual property, business structures, business transitions, business liability, and employment law. You will also develop skills in communication, interpretation, reasoning, and analysis which are crucial in Business Law.

Introduction to Business

Introduction to Business provides you with the fundamentals on core theories, concepts and principals of Marketing, Economics, Accounting, and Management. This module will help you to develop an understanding of how businesses operate in various aspects. You will be introduced to the role of marketing, PEST and SWOT analysis, demand and supply, and profit maximisation, among other things. Within a lecture environment, you will learn about the key techniques and theoretical underpinnings of these aspects. You will also study and discuss practical examples and case studies to write a business proposal.

First Year Pathway Course structure

Global Business Environment and International Strategy

You’ll explore the factors that affect business, from a mostly external perspective, including elements of globalisation and international business and the fundamental skills needed in the world of business. Political, Economics, Social, Legal, Ecological and Technological factors will be examined in the macro business environment and how these interact in a competitive environment with globalisation, technological and social change to create complex strategic options for organisations. You will also explore in some detail the concept of sustainability and introductory economics.

Organisational Behaviour

You’ll be introduced to a range of organisational behaviour issues that you may encounter in your career and be provided with evidence-informed analyses of ways in which culture, leadership, structure and motivation affect workers and workplaces. This foundation enables you to analyse the human side of management and diagnose problems affecting organisations both independently and as part of a group.

You’ll have the opportunity to take managerial, critical, symbolic-interactivist and feminist perspectives to business issues and organisational behaviour related theories, models and concepts to build your social capital and critical analytical skills. Specifically, we will equip you with the knowledge and human capitals to understand how people and organisations function in individual, group and organisational levels based on the latest academic evidence on topics such as motivation, leadership, teams, organisational structure and culture. Finally, we aim to inspire you to value and continuously use the best available academic evidence on effective management of people and organisations throughout your career.

Introduction to Business Contracts and the Law

As an introduction to a broad range of civil legal issues, you’ll get an insight and appreciation of the various ways in which the law impacts on the world of commerce and our everyday life. The module provides a foundation across a broad range of fundamental legal principles and concepts of the English Legal System. The rights and obligations of legal entities/individuals under the Law of Contract and the Law of Tort will also be examined.

Introduction to Financial Analysis and Management

Finance and business information is the lifeblood of any organisations operations and decisions. You’ll work with data and case studies from organisations, meet with businesses to understand the practical use this key information is put to and present your decisions on a going concern or start-up. As you present your analysis of key information and conclusions to other stakeholders, you’ll develop your persuasion and negotiation skills.

Digital Business and Principles of Marketing

This module presents a fusion between the philosophies which underlie marketing, with a strong emphasis of integrating digital and traditional concepts and the real life application of marketing across a variety of sectoral contexts. You’ll examine the core marketing concept of customer value and the interplay between marketing and sustainability and the ethical challenges and critiques of modern marketing. You’ll gain a wide range of knowledge across a breadth of sectors and be able to adapt these to whatever career or future research you choose. On completion of the module you’ll have not only a solid grounding in marketing philosophies and theories but also a critical view of marketing, based around the realisation of the reality of modern digital marketing operations and management in a context of increasing global economic challenges, but also within a context where the customer profile is shifting to become increasingly demanding, critical and questioning of the motivations and ethics behind the marketers activities.


Related links

For more information about intake semesters and campus location please see our course matrices.

Find out the academic entry requirements for our courses listed by country. Unless stated, requirements are standard across all courses.

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