The management sector is one of the most varied areas of employment. So much so that there are hundreds of courses out there tailored to different specialisms.
Here at Birmingham City University, we offer a wide range of postgraduate management courses:
- Executive Master of Business Administration
- MSc Internal Audit Management and Consultancy
- MA International Human Resource Management / Development
- PGDip International Human Resource Management / Development
- International MBA
- MSc Management and Entrepreneurship
- MSc Management and Finance
- MSc Management and International Business
- MSc Management and Marketing
These courses lend themselves to a wide variety of future careers, opening up not just the world of management to graduates, but also a massive variety of specialisms. You don’t even need to have studied management before – several of our courses are open to graduates from other academic backgrounds.
Here are just some of the careers you could move into after graduating from our postgraduate management degrees.
Specialist Managers
The obvious, but also the most varied option for management graduates, becoming a “manager” is a very big blanket term that doesn’t really touch on just how much one manager’s role can differ from another.
The advantage of postgraduate study in management is it allows you to really specialise in one area. Your undergraduate course would have given you a solid foundation to build upon, but not necessarily all the insight and expertise needed to move straight into a specialist role. Throughout courses only, there is the opportunity to specialise in such areas as:
- Marketing Management – Overseeing the development, production and purchase of marketing material
- Finance Management – Overseeing the financial activities and transactions of organisations, as well as assisting organisations in meeting their financial goals, raising capital, handling mergers and acquisitions, and assessing global financial activities
- Human Resource Management – Overseeing employee/employer relations, handling disputes, disciplineries and absences. There are also HR Business Partners, who work at a senior level within organisations and conglomerates to develop complex HR strategies
- Product Management – Overseeing the development and launch of new products, ensuring multiple parts of a business come together to make the products are success
- Operations Management – Overseeing overall daily operations of an organisation, including purchasing, inventory management, coordination between departments and creation of policy.
- Audit Management – Overseeing and facilitating internal audits, ensuring they are carried our thoroughly and in accordance with best practice and professional standards.
- Insurance and Risk Management – understanding risk in the context of an organisation and how insurance is used to mitigate those risks.
- Organisation Risk Management – identifying, analysing and monitoring risks and how they are managed across the organisation.
These are just some examples of specialist management roles that await those who graduate from postgraduate management courses. There is also the possibility that you already have specialist knowledge of a field, and come into postgraduate study to acquire the management skills needed to complement it. Several of our management courses allow you to do this, as they don’t require you to have studied management before.
Management Consultancy
On the other side of the coin, there are also those who businesses go to when they want to improve their own internal management. Management consultants are external advisors who aid organisations with their problems, either on a small scale by working with individuals, or on a larger scale by looking at a business’s whole management structure.
This is a line of work that typically requires a lot of personal experience of different management roles, as your experiences elsewhere will be able to inform any solutions you offer. However, for those who are up to the challenge, management consultancy can allow you to work for a vast array of companies, with new and exciting challenges every day.
Entrepreneurs
Of course, you may decide the only person worth managing is yourself! A career in management doesn’t necessarily have to start by slotting into a big company – the skills you pick up during your studies could easily be spun into starting your own business and growing it yourself.
Plenty of our graduates have gone on to take their ideas and develop them outside of big business. And as things grow, there’s no reason why you won’t eventually become a manager anyway, as you start to gain employees as your business goes from strength to strength. This to speaks again to the diversity of studying management – it can really take you anywhere you want to go.
Research
Looking for a less convention path? With a sector as vast as management, there is plenty of researchers delving into it, analysing the sector in thousands of ways to figure out how and why it all fits together, and how it can be improved going forward.
Management research can be done on an individual basis, through taking your studies further through PhD research, all the way up to joining research centres like the ones seen here at Birmingham City Business School. Our academics and researchers are looking into businesses big and small, which not only benefits our students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, but also the organisations who work with us.
As you can see, it’s really hard to get a full grasp on what career could lie ahead for you if you study management at a postgraduate level, but only because the possibilities are endless! Whichever way you want to go though, you’ll find a course for you at Birmingham City University.
