About this course

This Senior Leader Apprenticeship (SLA) programme provides you with knowledge, skills and capabilities needed to lead and support your organisation in continued sustainable growth, and also offers you a unique university postgraduate qualification. It aims to transform participants into confident business professional

• Delivered in blocks for extra flexibility and to fit studies around existing commitments
• Study on a course designed in response to government and local ambitions for responsible business growth
• Relevant for those with responsibility for leading strategy and change, managing a budget and developing staff to ensure continued and responsible growth.
• Study carefully crafted modules centring around scale-up approaches and issues across the key business functions
• Learn alongside others experiencing similar challenges and discuss leadership and strategy in the context of Scaling-Up.
• Use work-related course assessments to enhance your professional and organisational development through relevant research and learning
• Achieve Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration for Scale-Up which supports application for Chartered Manager Status with the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).
• Achieve Senior Leader Apprenticeship (SLA) Award
• Opportunity to self-fund a top-up MBA qualification upon completion of this programme.

A 'scale-up' is an enterprise that has experienced significant growth rates in employees and turnover over a number of years.

Nationally, scale-up businesses have been identified as a priority area, recognised by the appointment of a scale up champion in Government who aims to increase the number of businesses maximising opportunities to reach their growth potential. This will feed into the Government's industrial strategy. The course combines key management disciplines from the key QAA and CMI benchmark statements with recent national research on the drivers of business scale up.

Our programme team has a strong regional network with relevant ecosystem and SME growth knowledge. This provides further opportunity for external stakeholder insights throughout the duration of the programme’s lifecycle. The content has been informed by discussions with these networks, in particular with representatives from the Scale Up Institute, the Small Business Charter and the LCRCA.

This programme has been carefully crafted to cluster the knowledge, skills and behaviour standards into a set of facilitated modules over 4 semesters (years 1 and 2). The second part, if you choose to undertake and fund it, is a supervised strategic business project to top-up to an MBA.