How to choose a business course

Finding a business course that suits you is a little bit like the process of a business takeover in that there are number of steps you should work through before you sign on the dotted line. Once you’ve identified your career goals and your academic strong points, and then shortlisted your colleges and programmes, the next and most important stage is the due diligence.

It’s an essential step any business acquisition and it should be the same if you are shopping around for a business course. This process is about evaluating your prospective college and course from all possible angles, which might include checking out its reputation, where past graduates have ended up, the quality of the course content, the costs, the length, whether there are work placements or opportunities to study abroad and, of course, the ease of gaining employment after graduating.Business courses are these days quite remarkable for their sheer diversity, helped by the huge extent to which business schools have collaborated with other fields of study such as IT, languages and law to create multidisciplinary or combination programmes.

But with the wider array of courses now available you are also likely to come across a whole range of course titles with terms such as “innovation”, “strategic”, “entrepreneurship” or “leadership” . Even if these terms are attractive to you, they can mean different things to different people, so it’s worth looking past the titles and digging down into the course content to find out exactly what it’s all about.

As Michael Flynn, course director of TCD's MBA programme points out, you might find two colleges each offering courses with the very specific- sounding titles of "MSc in Innovation and Leadership", but the likelihood is the content and structure of those two courses could be quite different.

“They need to have a really good understanding of the content, the teaching philosophy, the learning environment that encompasses that programme because quite often the programme’s title may be somewhat trendy or fashionable, but underneath it there’s not much going on that’s different from other programmes,” he said.

Its also worth bearing in mind that many of the most popular, broader business studies courses will, to a greater or lesser extent, enable their students to pick and choose from a whole variety of modules – almost like an à-la-carte menu – to create a course content blend that could be entirely your own.

For instance, with the bachelor of business studies at University of Limerick’s Kemmy Business School, “You could take a combination of risk management and insurance and financial services, or you could do risk management and insurance with law and that would get you into the compliance and risk governance space,” said assistant dean Fergal O’Brien.

He also remarks on the increasing “internationalisation” of the business school student body at all levels. “If you look around and see many more international students, this changes the dynamic in the classroom because of the different cultures present, and in turn enhances the learning experience.”

Laurence Whitson of the DIT career development centre says more business schools are developing opportunities for students to undertake ‘live case studies’, which allow students to work on issues and challenges for real companies and then engage with the firms on them.

“Working on these live case studies enhances skills across a range of competencies including analysis, negotiation and conflict resolution, and students get to apply their learning throughout modules.”

Problem-based learning, which was originally developed for the medical field, is also popular with business students, he adds. “PBL is a blended learning approach with input by the lecturer, but the onus is on students to research a specific problem and develop business solutions.”

“You can tweak things according to your preferences.”

For those interested in working in the nonprofit or public sectors – and therefore not in it for the money – Flynn also points to how the study of management “transcends all business activity”.

“Management is not about business. Management is about running an organisation in the most efficient and optimal way possible, and making sure you’re meeting your mission objectives – whether it is profit- based or not.”

The selection of business course profiles on the right are arranged in five broad subject areas: accounting and finance, business studies, business with technology, management and marketing. They include courses at all level from basic business certificate-level courses at level five and six to diplomas and degrees (levels seven and eight), to postgraduate programmes (levels nine to 10). They also include multidisciplinary or combination programmes and conversion courses as well as part-time courses (or options to study part time).