Business Analytics with Professional Practice (Taught)

Learn how to harness the power of data to drive business success on our MSc Business Analytics, preparing you for a range of in-demand jobs.

This MSc in Business Analytics with Professional Practice allows you to develop not only a solid academic underpinning to support your career but also builds in a semester long professional internship to develop practical, in-industry skills. The combination of the theoretical and the practical leaves you with the ideal mix of experiences that employers are looking for.

Our flexible course blends general management topics such as strategy, leadership and project management with data analytics subjects including soft systems methodology, statistics, coding, database management and data visualisation.

Available to study full time, this course equips you with the skills to structure, integrate, and analyse qualitative and quantitative data to formulate effective business solutions.
With businesses generating vast amounts of data both internally and externally in today’s data-rich environment, there are great career opportunities for those who can understand this data and leverage it to create business insights and enhance business processes and practices.

Business Analytics with Professional Practice

• Data Analytics for Management Decision-Making: This module explores the sources of data, how that data is collected, processed, and presented, and then continues the data lifecycle by considering how this is used within informed decision-making processes within contemporary enterprises.

• Statistics and Analytics for Data Visualisation in Business: In this module, you will explore data and the questions it can answer. Using existing datasets, you will develop research questions, describe variables and relationships, calculate basic statistics, and present results clearly. You’ll gain a robust quantitative foundation, practical problem-solving techniques, and knowledge in data analysis for business problems.

• Systems Analytics and Data Architecture: This module provides a strategic view of business information systems and their data structures to support analytics and business re-engineering. It covers methods for analysing and designing information systems using object-oriented methods. Students will learn about the system development lifecycle, professional standards, and roles at each stage.

• Business Forecasting and Data Modelling: Business forecasting and data modelling are essential in business analytics. This module covers forecasting, predictive analytics, and data modelling, employing various methodologies to meet evolving business needs. You’ll learn to distinguish true signals from noise, perform forecasting using time-based data, and apply techniques like regression, classification, clustering, Bayesian, and machine learning.

• Contemporary Issues in Business and Society: This module aims to enable you to reach a well-grounded understanding of the theory and practice of international management and relate it to events taking place at a global and national level. Utilising the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a discursive element within the module, the ways in which businesses can positively contribute to achieving these will be critically evaluated.

• Finance for Management: This module develops your critical understanding of essential management accounting and finance topics within a business environment, enabling you to develop a high-level understanding of how financial information helps to make informed and accurate management decisions. This module is CIMA accredited.

• Strategic Management: This module concerns itself with assessing what’s important, determining how to get there, and avoiding the potential pitfalls. By focusing on long-term sustainable success, strategic management enables practitioners to avoid the noise of the day-to-day. The module incorporates strategic concepts, tools and techniques that organisations can employ to assess their environment and resources and make strategic decisions towards long-term success.

• Research Methods Problems and Solutions: Research has an important role within academic studies but is also a core skill for managers and leaders within contemporary enterprises. This module is designed to develop both theoretical research knowledge, and practical insights into the purpose, nature, execution, and value of research approaches and how these can be effectively utilised in the solving of problems in the context of academic knowledge creation or organisational professional practice.

• Professional Practice Internship: Upon completion of the taught courses above, you will also undertake an internship in an area where you plan to develop your career. Working with the Internship team, you will source and develop an internship in partnership with both the internship provider and the university.

• Dissertation: In addition to the Internship, you will also complete a 12,000-word Dissertation after the internship programme has been completed.