Weekend Executive MBA

Course review:
The programme is available in two separate modes to suit individual needs and preferences: and part-time weekdays.
The part-time weekend mode suits people who enjoy more independent study, with an emphasis on virtual learning complemented by four intense days a month (Thursday to Sunday) in college. Students can fit the schedule into their holiday entitlement, and can also fly in monthly from abroad.
The part-time weekday mode suits students who can take more time off from work and who enjoy learning with other people. This mode is taught in college every other Friday plus 8 three weekday blocks during the first year. All the benefits of the Imperial MBA, while you continue your current employment.
You'll complete practical projects so the knowledge you gain becomes part of your normal approach to challenges and you develop into a genuinely entrepreneurial leader.
You'll experience the latest thinking and discoveries in business through cutting edge research that feeds directly into the teaching.

You'll be able to work on ideas that really interest you because, unlike other business schools, Imperial has a steady flow of intellectual property to develop commercially.
You'll increase your value to your business and improve your chances of achieving your career goals.
The Imperial Executive MBA gives you the knowledge and skills to create value within the global economy. You'll be able to:

• Identify global trends and opportunities
• Build and motivate high performance teams
• Shape long-term strategy
• Develop your own entrepreneurial behaviour, and your team's
• Access under-utilized resources to create enduring value.

It gives you the confidence to lead. You'll be able to:

• Deliver projects, through practical work
• Understand and modify your psychological make-up
• Increase your influence, through developing your interpersonal skills.
• Develop the power of informal networks.

It provides life-long opportunities through:

• The power of the Imperial College brand to open doors for you
• Working with like-minded people who share your ambitions
• Our active and successful alumni network.

Weekend Executive MBA
The weekend Executive MBA programme has been structured so you can get the most out of the EMBA experience without interrupting your momentum at work. In the first year, you attend one long weekend a month from April to December (Thursday afternoon, Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning). Each module is highly interactive; you'll be studying with a diverse range of like-minded professionals. Between modules, while consolidating your learning in the workplace, you cover new material through our online learning system, preparing you for more advanced classroom sessions.

Programme content
Whether you choose the weekday or weekend study mode, you'll graduate with a thorough knowledge of all the essential business disciplines to make the transition from manager to leader. The programme content is the same for both study modes:

• 5electives
• Project
• Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design
• International Study Tour.

The study mode which best suits you will depend on how you like to learn.

Learning style for the weekend programme
The weekend Executive MBA programme is highly intensive. The programme is 21 months compared with 24 months for the weekday study mode, so you're covering the same material in less time.
You'll spend one weekend a month at the Business School, but you'll have to cover a lot of material independently outside the classroom. Online learning tools help you stay in touch between weekends, so you still have support. However, you'll need the confidence to take concepts into the workplace and test them out before covering them in the classroom.
You may find the weekend programme suits you if:

• You enjoy independent study and working concepts out on your own
• You have the confidence to grapple with highly quantitative material outside the classroom
• You do'nt want to take time out of work every fortnight
• You don't live in or near London - it is possible to commute for the weekend programme
• You are free to attend classes at the weekend
• Your employer would prefer you studied in your own time.

Imperial Executive MBA core courses

Core courses build rapidly on your previous experience while introducing new and challenging disciplines. You'll cover the general functions of management, exploring essential business topics and acquiring the skills you need to be an effective and inspiring leader in your chosen career. You take eight core courses in total, each consisting of approximately 20 - 26 hours in the classroom.

Accounting Management Analysis
The course aims to contribute to the development of the participant's managerial potential by explaining the techniques of financial and management accounting and examining their relevance to the broader issues of management decision-making and control in organizations.
During the course, participants should develop the ability to:

• Evaluate the costing principles underlying the classification and processing of cost accounting data
• Specify the organisational context of management accounting, and perceive the strengths and limitations of management accounting data in improving organisational effectiveness
• Read, interpret and analyse published accounts and to evaluate the well-being and potential of a company using ratio and SWOT analysis
• Produce and interpret historical and projected cash flow statements
• Apply standard techniques to the solution of simple short and long-run financial decision problems by selecting and utilising relevant information
• Prepare a master budget and analyse variances given forecast and actual performance data for a simple case

Business Economics
Economics is about decision making, decision making means choosing between alternatives. When there are only two or three alternatives, it is relatively simple to figure out the relative attractiveness of each one - but what are we to do when the choices can numbered in tens of thousands? One way we can summarise these choices is through mathematical calculus. This method is the mainstay of most economics, and it cannot realistically be taught without using it. However, the amount of calculus needed for a short course such as this is relatively small, and easily mastered.
The aims and objectives of this course are:

• To introduce basic economic concepts of practical value in business life
• To provide an internally consistent conceptual framework for thinking about the interaction between the firm and the market
• To identify the ways in which profit opportunities arise in markets and the ways in which they can be effectively exploited

Economic Framework
This course provides a basic framework to help you understand how contemporary macro-economics explains dramatic events in national and international economies. You'll explore how factors like confidence, expectations and crowd psychology result in aggregate behaviour (e.g. demand in the whole UK economy) which is very different from what you'd expect from the study of individual behaviour. Without some form of coordination, individual behaviour can lead to inferior outcomes. This helps justify the need for good institutions and public policy to raise welfare in nations.
By the end of the course, you'll appreciate how business, government and the global economy interact. By having a better understanding of the causes of booms and busts, of crises arising from either internal or external events, and social and labour unrest, you will be able to make more informed managerial decisions. A more coherent framework for analysing how macroeconomic phenomena influence economic policy enables managers to enjoy a competitive advantage.

Financial Management
This course provides a framework for analysing financial markets and showing how they interact with the key decisions of firms. You will:

• Understand the role of different assets, sources of finance and pricing
• Examine the interaction between the economy and financial variables
• Analyse capital investment decisions and the valuation of firms
• Understand risk, return and portfolio diversification
• Understand speculation, hedging, arbitrage and risk management techniques.

Marketing Management
The main objective of this course is to help you understand how marketing contributes to business strategy, and how marketing plans are developed, implemented and evaluated. A secondary objective is to help you develop the conceptual, technical and interpersonal skills marketing managers need to communicate effectively in the business world.
During the course you'll develop:

• An understanding of the role of marketing within the firm
• An understanding of how marketing contributes to the firm's survival and growth
• An understanding of how marketing plans are developed, implemented and evaluated
• The conceptual, technical and interpersonal skills marketing managers need to communicate effectively in the business world
• The analytical skills needed to analyse customers and competitors.

By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

• Understand and make a case for the role of marketing within the firm
• Develop, implement and evaluate marketing plans
• Analyse customers and competitors
• Do all the above in a global context.

People and Organisations
The People and Organisations course will seek to provide students with a framework for understanding organisations and for managing some of their key organisational processes. It will also provide an opportunity for thinking about yourself as a leader and how you can continue to develop your leadership skills.
Students who successfully complete the course will be able to:

• Apply a variety of perspectives to the analysis and understanding or organisational situations and issues
• Explain the role of power in organisation life
• Explain the value of culture as an explanatory concept
• Describe some of the key issues involved in the recruitment, retention, and development of people

Quantitative Methods
In order to make decisions, a modern manager needs to be able to understand, manipulate and communicate numerical information. This course provides a sound appreciation of the application of quantitative methods and skills in a managerial context specifically to:

• Give a framework to facilitate data-based decision making
• Enhance communication skills in relation to quantitative information.

You'll develop a familiarity with statistics and probability theory, with an emphasis on practical application, rather than formal derivation.
The main skills you'll develop are the identification of the nature of a quantitative problem (problem recognition), the information required to enable a decision to be taken (output), the initial information needed (input) and the method of solution (process).
By the end of the course you'll be able to communicate competently with numerical data, to evaluate data presented to you critically and to present them in a concise and meaningful manner, to carry out simple data processing or model building exercises by yourself (or explain how it should be done), and to commission more advanced exercises. You will recognise the constraints that decision makers face day-to-day.

Strategic Management
Definitions of strategy refer to the allocation of resources in a competitive environment over relatively long periods of time in pursuit of specific goals. Strategy is shaped by the underlying market conditions as well as the resources available to management (including the firm's internal structure, systems and culture). This integration of the external and internal perspectives provides the basic framework for strategic thinking.
By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

• Assess industry attractiveness and recognise drivers to firms' profit-making
• Design strategies that help firms achieve, sustain, and renew competitive advantage:
• • nurture, recognise and exploit use of firms' competences
  • think outside of industry boundaries and create new market space
  • understand managers' role in the process of making strategy

• Be aware of the challenges to implement a strategy once it has been formulated.