Admission and Unit Information - Graduate Certificate in Business Administration

Contemporary Organisation Behaviour has been designed to offer you tools which can help you manage people in an increasingly complex organisational climate. Therefore, the objectives of the unit focus on critically evaluating how organisations, groups and teams and individual behaviour can affect work performance and productivity.

Accounting Perspectives for Managers focuses on the analytical uses of accounting information for managers. It emphasises the role of both financial and management accounting in measuring, processing and communicating information that is useful in making economic decisions.

Marketing Management is designed to provide an introduction to the key concepts, principles and practices that constitute the Marketing discipline. It will develop a focus on marketing as a business philosophy underpinning the activities of the firm.

Value Chain Management introduces the management of operations in the value chain for many industry sectors (including services, public sector, manufacturing and distribution). The objective is to equip future managers with an ability to analyse value creation and business performance in a range of situations. The knowledge and analytical skills developed will facilitate consideration and appropriate management of the operational and supply chain issues of many aspects of business that participants will encounter in later MBA units and in their organisations. Learning activities emphasise case analysis and reflection, as well as quantitative techniques that can support decision-making and evaluation.

Managing People addresses the management of the employment relationship and work as crucial for organisational performance. The role of line managers relative to HR specialists is considered. There is an overview of human resource and industrial relations functions, with consideration of their integration with organisational strategy, around the theme of ways that human resource management can be difficult, for commercial, social, ethical and legal reasons. The scope for strategy relative to environmental imperatives is debated, using the concepts of the psychological contract and labour market competition. Participants draw from personal experience to debate theory, case studies/simulations and contemporary developments.

The finance skills learnt in this unit can optimally be applied at the managerial decision-making level to add the most value personally and professionally. This unit considers the concepts of finance theory and tools of financial decision-making in the context of the Australian and international institutional environments. These concepts relate primarly to the time value of money, risk and return, capital budgeting and capital structure. Students examine the investment, financing and dividend decisions of corporations.