Business Foundations Certificate

This course provides an introduction to both financial and managerial accounting.  A large aspect of the course covers the fundamentals of financial accounting. The objective is to examine the concepts and principles underlying the accounting and financial reporting process, including a focus on understanding the structure of the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows, and developing the skills necessary to evaluate a firm’s financial position and its operating, investing, and financing activities.  The course also introduces the core concepts of managerial accounting, with emphasis on the development and use of accounting information for internal decisions and control. Through the topics addressed, such as cost behaviour, product and service costing, relevant costs for decision-making, and financial and nonfinancial performance indicators, the objective is to understand how managerial accounting information is used to steer the business and assess whether strategy execution is on track.

This course covers fundamental concepts in corporate finance and capital markets. It includes basic valuation concepts and techniques such as “time value of money” and discounted cash flows (DCF). You will gain an understanding of how to make value-creating investment decisions and how to use the DCF approach to value a company.

This course offers a practical framework that explores the fundamentals of operations management. The experiential approach used in the course utilizes a series of hands-on simulations and case studies to allow participants to discover the fundamental operational trade-offs in matching supply and demand, and analyze options that will help address them in a competitive setting. By the end of the course, the participants will have developed an understanding of how the operations function contributes to value creation and capture in an organization.

Starting your own business? First, you must understand the market you are going to operate in. How big is it? What is the competition like? Then you will need to understand how customers make their choices and how to “segment” them. Third, you must develop your long-term marketing strategy– by choosing a target segment and defining the benefits of your product or service for these customers. Fourth, you must make your tactical decisions – how to communicate, deliver and capture the customer value. Finally, you have to monitor performance continually.

This course synthesises many of the fundamentals studied in the other classes as you examine the process of converting an opportunity into a profitable and sustainable new business. You will focus on the principles of building an enterprise on its own, in addition to the unique challenges of carrying out entrepreneurial activities within an existing organisation (in other words how to start a business inside a corporation without “getting yourself killed in the process”).

The purpose of this course is to increase your effectiveness and skill in analyzing and leading behaviour in organisations. It is a class in applied behavioural sciences, which takes insights and frameworks from psychology, social psychology and sociology – and explores their implications for managerial practice and leadership.

Ultimately, it is the prices paid and charged by an organisation that determines how economic value is divided between the business, its consumers and its suppliers. This course teaches you how to use structured thinking based on microeconomic theory to understand how economic fundamentals – such as demand, cost, market structure and government policy – shape the prices that prevail in a market.

Why are some organisations consistently successful, while others are left behind? What can executives do to drive performance and growth in the face of intense competition, uncertainty or even radical industry disruption? This course explores some of the critical challenges you’ll face as a manager setting the path for your organisation.

The goal of this course is to provide a solid foundation in probability and statistics for your management career. After all, most decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. So you will need a framework for thinking about problems involving uncertainty and acquire tools for interpreting data.