Business Management with Foundation BA Honours
London, United Kingdom
DURATION
4 up to 5 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Request application deadline
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
USD 17,000 / per year
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
Introduction
Our degree courses with a Foundation year offer the opportunity to prepare you for advanced study before you progress on to a full honours degree at the University of Westminster.
Whether you do not feel ready for degree-level study, don’t have the right qualifications, or want to change your subject specialism or return to study after an absence from education, we aim to encourage a broad range of students to undertake our Foundation year to progress onto their full honours degree with us.
The Foundation year is designed to give you the opportunity to explore new ideas, opening up new perspectives on the key debates within your chosen field. Core modules accelerate your academic and professional development and you will also take modules from areas closely related to your chosen field, giving you the chance to develop a cross-disciplinary perspective on your course.
On successful completion of the Foundation year, you will be able to move on to study for the Business Management BA Honours degree.
Our highly flexible business degree is designed for those who want to thrive in a rapidly changing global, cultural, and technological business world. You’ll develop the versatility, vision, and wisdom that future business leaders and managers need.
With an emphasis on learning through practice, you will develop the breadth of knowledge, skills, and capabilities to respond proactively and creatively to contemporary business issues and challenges. A large range of optional modules – covering everything from brands and business ethics to entertainment and sport – means you can tailor your studies each year.
You’ll also hear direct from industry practitioners, who will share their own experience of, for example, incorporating the principles of the circular economy in their businesses.
You will be encouraged to adopt an enquiring and critical approach to ideas and issues, developing the graduate attributes that employers value. For example, when learning how to evaluate company performance in sustainability, you will be tasked with investigating the big picture through news and contemporary journals rather than relying solely on a company’s PR. You’ll also gain hands-on experience of common business computing and software, including Tableau Data Visualisation, FAME, and the Microsoft Office suite.
All of this will help develop the necessary confidence and business acumen to set up your own business or contribute proactively to private business, public, or ‘third’ sector organisations. Past graduates have found successful employment as management, marketing, and advertising trainees, as trainee accountants and brand managers, as recruitment consultants, as retail managers, and as assistants in market research, PR, and global brand.
Top reasons to study with us
- Study at one of London’s leading centres for business education based in the heart of London and its political, media, and financial services scene
- Highly flexible structure with the opportunity to change to other business management course specialisms and choose from a large range of optional modules
- Programmes are delivered by a multicultural and international teaching body, who come from professional practice and/or regularly publish in top international journals
- Access to one of the largest financial databases in our state-of-the-art Bloomberg virtual trading room
- Free online subscription to The Financial Times
- Employability embedded across the curriculum, with dedicated specialist modules at every level
- Optional placement year to gain valuable work experience – previous students with this degree have conducted cloud marketing operations for an IT company and project management with General Electric and Rolls Royce
- Opportunity to undertake an internship which has enabled previous students to gain experience with, for instance, the NHS and Disney
- Guest lectures from industry practitioners have previously included speakers from IBM, Tableau, Coca-Cola, and LinkedIn
- Participate in Westminster Working Cultures trips to understand working cultures within businesses abroad, which in the past have included Berlin, Mumbai, and Washington DC
- Past graduates have secured jobs with prestigious organisations, including the Bank of England, BT, Coca-Cola, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Goldman Sachs
Admissions
Scholarships and Funding
The University is dedicated to supporting ambitious and outstanding students and we offer a variety of scholarships to eligible undergraduate students, which cover all or part of your tuition fees.
Curriculum
This degree will help you understand what makes a business tick and how to drive a business to succeed. In each year of study, you will take a combination of core and option modules. The flexible nature of the course allows you to choose topics that most suit your interests or career aspirations – even if these change as your course progresses. You can build your general business degree or choose to specialise in subjects such as economics, entrepreneurship, human resource management, digital business, or marketing.
The following subjects are indicative of what you will study on this course.
Foundation
Subjects of study include:
- Critical Thinking for Academic and Professional Development
- Current debates in Digital Business
- Current debates in Global Business
- Foundations in Business Data Analysis
- Foundations of Management
- Introduction to Academic Practice
There are no optional or elective modules offered at Level 3, as the focus is on the development of key academic skills through a broad understanding of Business and Management.
Year 1
You are introduced to the functions of business organisations, the broader business environment, and key management skills and competencies, including information gathering and analysis, accounting, economics, marketing, and organisational behaviour. We consider business organisations – their purposes, structures, and governance in a global context, together with cultural differences and ethical constraints. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, through case studies, discover how environmental, social, and governance issues have affected companies, including Divine Chocolate, for example. Drawing on real-life data from FAME, you’ll be tasked with analysing the financial performance of an organisation of your choice.
Subjects of study include:
- Accounting and Finance for Business
- Analytics for Decision Making
- Behaviour in Organisations
- Global Economies and the Business Environment
- Marketing for Business Managers
You will also have the opportunity to take an option module that broadens your skills or helps you gain more in-depth knowledge of your specialist area. Your option module may be a foreign language.
Year 2
You will investigate and learn how businesses operate, looking at how people are managed, how you manage business operations, and how managers make key decisions. We analyse business operations from both traditional and digital perspectives: the business process; the supply chain; systems integration; and the management of information, quality, demand, capacity, and resources. This covers aspects of electronic and mobile services, commerce and business, innovation and design in products and services, and developments in technology and systems. You will select three optional modules.
Subjects of study include:
- Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility
- Corporate Governance
- Entrepreneurial Practice
- Leadership and Development
- Legal Aspects of Employment
- Management Decision-Making for Business
- Project Management
- Sports Marketing
- Supply Chain, Operations Management, and Digital Business
- Sustainable City Economies
- Web-enabled Business
You will also have the opportunity to study a module from other faculties of the University, including a foreign language.
Alternatively, in place of the option modules listed above, you may be able to take the WBS Study Abroad Experience (subject to eligibility) or the WBS Work Experience.
Placement Year
Optional work placement/study abroad year
Between Years 2 and 3, you can take an optional work placement or study year abroad. The work placement year is a one-year, full-time business work placement. Past students have completed placements in a variety of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and prestigious organisations, including Barclays Bank, British Airways, Disney UK, IBM, and the National Health Service (NHS). The study abroad year allows you to follow a programme of study at one of our partner institutions, allowing you to experience life in another country and learn Business from a different cultural viewpoint.
You can also choose to split your year abroad into a first-semester exchange and a second-semester work placement, both conducted overseas.\
Year 3
Developing your specialist knowledge further through optional modules, you will learn to apply critical and reflective approaches to help explore the challenges facing organisations at a strategic level and from an organisational perspective, with a view of the broader competitive environment of today’s turbulent economy. In doing so, you will undertake research on a topic of your choice – anything from e-sport business development to environmental sustainability in business. Your studies culminate with the Global Strategic Management module, designed to simulate as closely as possible the nature of strategic decision-making in the management of a commercial organisation. You will analyse market, financial, and human resource information every week, making complex decisions.
Subjects of study include:
- Banking Theory and Practice
- Comparative International Management
- Contemporary Issues in Business Management
- Creating Entrepreneurial Leadership
- Developing My Professional Identity
- Digital Analytics
- Forecasting for Managers
- Global Accounting and Multinational Enterprises
- Global Marketing Management
- Interactive and Digital Marketing
- International Trade
- Project and Programme Management
- Social and Green Innovation
- Social Media for Business
- Strategic Management
- Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Program Tuition Fee
Career Opportunities
This course is designed to prepare you to become a business leader, an entrepreneur or seek employment in SMEs, blue-chip organisations, the public, private or third sector. It can lead to a wide variety of careers in: business, HR and finance; marketing, PR and sales; management; consultancy (strategic consulting, organisational planning, marketing; IT consulting; human resource consulting and business process management). The skills, knowledge and practical experience you gain will allow you to start contributing to your employer’s organisation quickly and effectively. Many of our students go on to postgraduate study here and at a range of other universities.
Industry links
Westminster Business School is one of London’s leading centres for business education based in the heart of London and its political, media and financial services scene. Staff who currently teach on this course have extensive professional experience in a range of business sectors with many staff maintaining links with industry through consultancy and training work.
Job roles
The course will prepare you for a wide variety of roles in business. Examples of these from our recent graduates are:
- Business partner (BT)
- Business sales executive
- Cyber security adviser
- International recruitment officer
- Marketing associate
- Personnel and development officer
- Senior solution engineer/consultant
Graduate employers
Graduates from this course have found employment at organisations including:
- Bank of England
- Barclays
- British Academy of Film and Television Arts
- BT
- Coca Cola
- EE
- HSBC
- NHS
- PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Transport for London