International Business Management with French BSc (Hons)

You will learn how financial information can be used to assist managers and external user groups in their decision-making processes. You will initially look at the informational needs of outside user groups, the nature of the information they are provided with, and how this information can be analysed and interpreted in order to enhance the effectiveness of their decision making.

Topic areas will include:

• The reporting frameworks and ethical principles that underpin financial reporting
• The nature of international financial reporting standards
• Format and content of the statement of profit or loss and statement of financial position
• The statement of cash flows
• Analysis and interpretation of financial statements using ratio analysis

You will then examine how financial information can facilitate managers in making operational decisions in relation to planning and control.

Topic areas will include:

• Costing (full and variable costing)
• Cost, volume, profit analysis
• Relevant costs for decision making
• Budgeting and variance analysis
• Balance scorecards
• Working capital management

Finally, you will explore the motivations for entrepreneurial activity and techniques that can be used to appraise investment decisions.

Topic areas will include:

• Investment appraisal techniques (payback, accounting rate of return, net present value and internal rate of return)
• Practical aspects of investment appraisal (inflation and capital rationing)
• Risk and uncertainty

In this module, you will develop the knowledge and skills in applying a variety of quantitative data analysis techniques to support business decision making. You will be introduced to business modelling using appropriate analytical tools, and your learning will cover a range of techniques to help business forecasting and data presentation.
In this module you will be exposed to a range of data analysis tools and skills, including:

• Business Analysis and Modelling: management of complex and varied data sets; building spreadsheet models.
• Data Trends and Associations e.g. identifying relationships between business variables.
• Business Forecasting and Predictive Modelling – analysing factors and trends for business planning.
• Business and Dashboard reporting – consolidation, interpretation and presentation of data for professional output.
• Data distribution, data presentation and using summary statistics – handling a range of data for statistical analysis.
• Gaining an understanding of the overlap between business and research data and the selection of appropriate tools for management of both types of data.

Working with these analysis tools, you will learn to develop confidence in dealing with a wide range of data sets. You will become familiar with the role of modelling as an aid to problem solving and will build skills which enable you to interpret data and present your findings to a range of audiences. Very importantly, you will gain a good understanding of the crucial role that analysis of data and interpretation of results plays in the decision-making arena.

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.

Your programme aims to ensure that you are learners for business, not just of business, upon graduation. This module starts you on this journey by supporting your professional development. It aims to increase your awareness of and sensitivity to personal and employability/entrepreneurship/enterprise skills. It does this by focusing on programme-specific graduate career opportunities that require you to work on projects similar to those that graduates within your field will undertake once in employment. You are taking an experiential, team-focussed, project/problem-based approach. The module will support you in identifying and developing the essential skills, behaviours, and understanding required to sustainably and responsibly manage organisations and their people. These might include generic areas such as leadership, project management, management, resilience, empathy and professional judgment, and discipline-specific capabilities.
You will use this understanding to evaluate, practise, develop and re-evaluate your capabilities in these skills, behaviours and acumen areas, enabling you to build your own graduate identity. This approach underpins your successful future employability, entrepreneurship or enterprise activity. In addition, the activities provide you with authentic insights into the importance and challenges of team-working within organisations as you work to address real organisations’ issues.
Learner/team-led, tutor-guided sessions aim to support you in enhancing your employability and upon building your graduate identity. During the practical development of the key attributes and behaviours central to your future success within your chosen profession within a project-based environment, you will receive support from the programme team. In addition, by documenting and reflecting upon your progress towards achieving your own team defined KPIs, you will enhance your skills, behaviours, capabilities, and understanding.
In short, at the end of this module, you will:
• Have an understanding and increased awareness of, and sensitivity to, those personal skills and attributes which are central to your future employability in your chosen profession or future entrepreneurial or enterprise activity
• Be better prepared to understand the skills and qualities required by graduates in your field to secure future employment or engage in enterprise activity
Have practical experience of working on a real-life business project appropriate to your programme area, improving your project management, research, employability and collaboration skills

Learning French is about developing four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and learning about France. This is exactly what you will do on this introductory module! You will be exposed to a wide range of cultural, economic and socio-political issues in contemporary France in order to deepen your knowledge of the country. You will then use the four skills to engage with those issues. For the writing skills you will consolidate grammatical, syntactical, morphological and semantic structures in French. You will delve deep into French grammar and writing style, which will enable you to feel more confident about writing high-quality essays. For the reading skill you will widen your vocabulary base through a large range of vocabulary drawn from authentic, contemporary texts, which you will study and translate. You will enhance your listening skills, as well as acquiring further vocabulary, in multi-media language laboratories. In the speaking hour you will further enhance your vocabulary through tackling contemporary issues orally and be engaged in lively debates. The range of vocabulary and knowledge you will acquire, combined with your enhanced grasp of French grammar, will enable you to engage with a wide range of academic sources related to contemporary France, which you will critically evaluate and synthesise. You will enhance your familiarity with Information Technology relevant to the acquisition and exploitation of your foreign language skills in a research-informed, global context where your French language skills will empower you to understand the French-speaking world in a wider global context.

You will consolidate grammatical, syntactic, morphological and semantic structures in French in this module by means of a combination of interactive language seminars, multi-media language laboratory workshops and directed study focusing on listening, reading, speaking and writing on cultural, economic and socio-political issues in modern France. You will study and translate authentic, contemporary texts from French into English and make use of academic sources (oral and written) as you are introduced to research and materials on cultural, economic and socio-political issues in modern France. You will enhance your proficiency in written and spoken French from a post A-level platform. You will consolidate and extend your knowledge of the French language by improving grammatical and structural awareness and accuracy; you will also expand your grasp of the applied language relevant to French Area Studies, culture and business environments in the French-speaking world. You will be encouraged to critically evaluate information from a range of academic and authentic sources and you will be introduced to the skills of synthesising and organising information. You will enhance your familiarity with Information Technology relevant to the acquisition and exploitation of your foreign language skills in a research-informed, global context where your French language skills will empower you and open the doors to understanding the French-speaking world in a wider global context.

The module is comprised of three blocks of material. The three blocks are:

Globalisation
This block will cover topics such as the process of globalisation, barriers to globalisation, the benefits and costs of globalisation for business,
international trade, analysis of the external business environment, corporate social responsibility issues in the global economy, etc.
Economics
This block will focus on the market forces of supply and demand, supply and demand elasticity, government policy, gross domestic product (GDP),
the consumer price index, a macroeconomic theory of the open economy, etc.
Economic Competitiveness
Topics covered in this block include foreign market entry modes, process of foreign direct investment, analytical frameworks for assessing national
competitiveness, the risk assessment for business decisions, etc.

At the end of the module you will be able to:

1. Identify and describe the main features, trends & influences of the global business environment on international organisations.
2. Analyse various global and/or international business contexts and how these affect the strategic development of industries, markets and organisations.
3. Apply basic macro-economic theory in an international business environment and use economic analysis to examine major social and economic issues in the UK and beyond.