International Business and Finance including placement year - BSc (Hons)

University of Essex

This Professional and Academic Development module helps you build a foundation in core academic skill requirements to further improve the standard of your academic work across all of your first-year modules. This module also introduces you to the themes of career planning, employability skills, and awareness of career paths.

Introduction to Management is a broad-ranging module intended to provide a foundation in the most significant issues in management theory and practice, as well as to prepare you for related modules in subsequent years of your course. Because theoretical explanations, i.e. academic interpretations of what managers do and even of what they say they do, and what managers actually do in real organisations on a day-to-day basis, may differ, we will also draw out some of the connections and disjunctures between management theory and management practice. Our teaching also emphasises the ethics of managing and how to balance the bottom line of the business with the organisation's wider responsibilities to society and other stakeholders. The module also looks to explore how AI is being employed by managers and how this is changing the roles and responsibilities of the managers across sectors whilst also creating new risks and challenges.

Discover how allowing for common human traits such as overconfidence, fear of regret, pride, loss aversion, anchoring, framing, mental accounting, and representativeness can enable a better understanding of financial markets and the trading strategies of investors

What is the appropriate measure of risk for a particular security? How might an investor decide on the weightings of different assets in his/her portfolio? How can we identify mispriced stocks? Should you invest your savings in an actively managed fund or in a passive fund? You consider the main theories of risk and return and explore the implications of these theories for investors' decisions.

Gain an in-depth understanding of the external context within which international businesses operate, and the opportunities and challenges this poses to entrepreneurial firms, large and small. You examine the rationale for studying international business by discussing current developments in the global economy, particularly economic, financial, political/legal, technological and cultural challenges.

This module introduces a number of business and management research methods, with a particular focus on entrepreneurship and small business. You explore philosophical research issues, such as selecting appropriate research methods and judging the quality and value of findings. You learn how to write a research proposal and design and plan quantitative and qualitative research. This includes collecting data, analysing findings and presenting results.

This module will give you a clear understanding of feedback, Dweck`s concept of a `growth mindset`, and how you can use these to improve your studies and career. We want you to have a passion for learning, a willingness to challenge yourself, and an eagerness to learn from mistakes, so this module will help you to understand group work and presentations and to acquire the relevant skills to successfully undertake both. The module also serves as a bridge for your final year, so that students should be able to understand the expectations of the final year and the possible career paths you can take after you graduate, and how you can use summer vacations to get ahead.

The business world is increasingly global, complex and fast changing. While some organisations are consistently successful over a long period of time, many fail and are forgotten forever. In theory it should become consecutively easier to imitate the strategies of winning companies and dissipate their profits. In practice, however, only a few firms become long-term leaders. In this course, you explore why that is.

The Research Project module builds further on the knowledge and understanding of the research philosophy, design and data analysis students gained in the BE218 Business Research Methods module as final year students have the opportunity to carry out an independent research project to focus on a topic of their choice in relation to the degree course. Undergraduate students at Essex Business School (Southend Campus) are expected to complete a research project in the final year of their degree. The project can take a variety of forms but unlike other assignments it involves you conducting and writing-up a piece of original research. This final research project will be supported by the knowledge and understanding of research methods gained in BE218 Business Research Methods. The undergraduate Research Project is the equivalent of one term module in your degree course and is expected to be about 4000 to 5000 words in length. The project runs in parallel with your other third year modules. You will find that this can be a worthwhile learning experience, and a good project is a useful reference for a postgraduate study as well as outside employment.

This module builds on your understanding of management and organisation by considering the ethics of business activity. You are introduced to the origins, practice and theory of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). You consider a range of perspectives and use business literature to critically examine organisational ethics and analyse its constraints. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

Political, economic, and socio-cultural changes have culminated in the emergence of Human Resource Management (HRM) as a distinct function within many organisations. In particular, HRM has taken an increasingly strategic view of the organisations' employees as drivers of competitive advantage with primary HRM functions including recruitment and selection, performance and reward management, and training and development, which are correspondingly aligned with this aim. This is also accompanied by an increasing emphasis being placed on a host of new devolvement's including the use of digitised employee management systems and an emphasis on promoting organisational sustainability. This module will explore existing theories and approaches to contemporary strategic HRM, while also adopting a critical perspective on their impact and implementation. In doing so, it will consider how institutional and cultural contexts shape the ways in which employer-employee relationships are constructed, enforced, and normalised and will seek to highlight and explain the oft-observed gaps between theory and practice. This will enable you to develop a critical appreciation of strategic HRM challenges and an understanding of its potential impact on individuals, organisations, and the wider society.

The (mis)use of financial derivatives can potentially have catastrophic consequences for those who acquire them. And yet in recent years derivatives have become increasingly important, both for the financial sector and for the wider economy. On this course you discover how risk can be managed with the use of derivative instruments.

In this module you study the derivative market, in particular, futures and options markets. You explore various futures markets including the stock index, FX, commodities and interest rate contracts, how they are priced and hedged, and different trading strategies; as well as considering different option positions, the relationship between call and put option prices, and trading strategies.

This module will help you to understand the interests, skills and competencies which are relevant to your future career choices. You will learn how to find the graduate-level roles and career paths available to business students and you will learn about the skills necessary to successfully compete in the graduate labour market after you graduate.