Graduate's Opinion

Alan Paterson
GST Manager
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Sydney, Australia

"I came to WUT BS to study for an IMBA on a career break from PricewaterhouseCoopers in the UK. An MBA at WUT BS allows you to get many different perspectives on business. The academic staff both from Poland and overseas have a very broad business experience and I also drew on a lot on the experiences of others in my class. We also got the opportunity to go out and talk to businesses about the challenges they are experiencing in a changing world. On graduating from WUT BS I embarked on a new challenge in my professional life, moving to Sydney, Australia."

Programme blocs

Personal Development Programme, Economics, Accounting, Organization and Human Resources Management, Finance, Operations Management, Management Control and Information Systems, Marketing, Strategy and International Management, Legal Aspects of Business Activity and Business Project

Subjects	Number of hours
Semester 1
Personal Development Programme	64
Economics	80
Accounting	80
Semester 2 Finance	96
Marketing	64
Semester 3 Organization and Human Resources Management	64
Strategy and International Management	64
Legal Aspects of Business Activity	32
Semester 4 Operations Management	56
Management Control and Information Systems	56
Business Project	96
Total	752

BLOCK 1
Personal Development Programme
Development of soft skills necessary for conducting effective business operations is strongly practiced throughout the programme.
Our Personal Development Programme is divided into three parts:
-    “Open Yourself”, including WUT BS Code of Conduct, Team Building, Time Management, Presentations in Business English, Public Speaking, Negotiation Training,  Savoir-vivre / Business Etiquette; Research Methodology; Web tools
-    “Discover Yourself”, where you will be able to get objective information on your strengths and areas for development
-    “Define Your Future Challenges”, where you will get the opportunity to define your future career objectives. The module is based on individual sessions with programme participants where they get  psychological definition of career paths suitable for certain personality types. 


BLOCK 2
Economics
The course is divided into three sections, the first one dealing with the analysis of the firm in the market environment, the second with the macroeconomic environment and the third with the international environment. Through their involvement in the school, the course teachers have developed their teaching material in the light of Polish experience.

BLOCK 3
Accounting
Often referred to as "the language of business", accounting is a registration, measurement and communication discipline. The course concentrates on two areas of accounting: financial accounting and managerial (cost) accounting.

BLOCK 4
Finance
The course is an introduction to financial decision-making. The first part of the course is concerned mainly with making decisions on what assets to buy, and the second part is concerned with the ways to pay for the assets. Other subjects include equity portfolio management, mergers and acquisitions, international financial management, and financial institutions.

BLOCK 5
Marketing
The course is designed to give an introduction to strategic marketing covering the identification and definition of the market space in which competition takes place, selection and change of competitive actions over time, and adjustment of competitive action from segment to segment. Weight will be given to the evaluation and design of managerial processes in marketing concerned with diagnosing, planning and implementing change ahead of competition, as well as methods for forecasting patterns of reaction of the market-place and within the marketing organization.

BLOCK 6
Organization and Human Resources Management
In the course are presented and discussed models that help in designing formal structures and relevant management systems as well as help in choosing the appropńate basis and degree of differentiation and the appropńate mechanism of integration within the corporate culture. Issues such as human motivation, individual and group behaviour and negotiation will also be covered. Personal Development Programme. The new element of the Strategy block is „Leadership” module presenting the elements of leadership psychology.

BLOCK 7
Strategy and International Management
Examining strategies through environment and industry analyses, the course builds on the concepts of value chains and business systems and explores potential generic strategies such as cost leadership and differentiation. At the corporate level the problems under review are: Does a company have to concentrate on one industry or manage a portfolio of diverse businesses? Should it operate regionally, nationally or internationally? Does it have to develop its activities alone or enter a strategic alliance? The new element of the Strategy block is „Innovative Business Models” module presenting innovative perspectives for business development .


BLOCK 8
Operations Management
The objectives of this course are to enable the student to understand how operations management contńbutes to the way a firm competes in the market place and achieves commercial results. Business operations are understood as the levels of activity connecting daily operations to business investments. Topics treated in the course are: production and project management, logistics, quality assurance and the economics of variety.

BLOCK 9
Management Control and Information Systems
The topics covered in this course are: cybernetic view of control systems, management control (from the functional and the value chain perspective), improvement of management control through information systems examining corporate and divisional reporting systems, changes in planning and forecasting systems, and the ability to perform ad hock analysis, as well as the significance of managerial behaviour in the design of management control systems.

BLOCK 10
Legal Aspects of Business Activity
The subject encompasses the most important, i.e. from the point of view of the functioning of a market company, basic legal aspects. Special attention is placed to issues connected with contracts and the companies law. The specific features of the Polish law and of the law of the European Union is considered as well.

BLOCK 11
Business Project
Final projects function as an expertise solving a manager's problem in a chosen company. They are conducted in groups of a few people. The choice of the subject and the company belong to the students. Upon some consultations with the project mentor, professor Alastair Nicholson and the drawing-up of the project, it is officially defended, which forms an opportunity to present a method of solving the problem and to discuss that with council members. <<more