A Students' Guide To Being Curious And Competent

Starting university is an exciting but also scary time and this unit will support and develop students with the core study skills to prepare them for studying successfully now and in the future. It is expected that everyone on this first semester unit will join with varying levels of experience in studying within an educational environment and that some will be returning to studies after a considerable break. There will also be an interesting mix of different career aspirations and a variety of different and valuable life skills and work experience to share with peers.

This unit will aim for students to become confident, competent, credible, creative, and curious learners who have a clear vision of opportunities available to them so that they can move into the first year of higher education as active and competent learners.  

Students will take control of their own skills journey with an individual learning plan, where they will develop and stretch themselves through a process of self-discovery and experimentation.  The supportive approach of this unit is to ensure students can experiment with different time management techniques, note taking methods and learning styles.  Students will also gain the knowledge and skills to navigate the key university systems, processes, procedures, and support systems available to students. A core aspiration of the unit is for students to be able to take responsibility for their own learning because they have the base skills to know how they need to study in order to succeed.

This unit will energise students for the future and provide a major step forward towards the kind of future they envisage for themselves. 

Upon completion of this unit students will be equipped and prepared to progress their studies successfully and have the confidence to reach out for support both within and outside of the university. 

Developing A Business Radar

In this second semester of study students will be feeling more confident in the university environment and will have the core study skills in place so that they are in a position to stretch and challenge themselves.  

This unit will aim for students to continue their journey towards being confident, competent, credible, creative and curious learners by offering the opportunity for them to explore how to continue to challenge themselves through further self discovery and experimentation. Students will be able to continue to expand their horizons and be encouraged to look to the wider world so that they can begin to develop a business radar.

A core aspiration of the unit is for students to investigate how the business world is ever changing and how organisations have to be agile in order to survive and thrive. Students will demonstrate a curiosity of business contexts and be encouraged to draw inspiration from the business world and to investigate how to fulfil their aspirational goals within this world.

Credibility And Your Professional Future

In the first semester units students gained a clear vision of the opportunities available to them so that they can move into the first year of higher education as active and competent learners. In this second semester of study students will continue their journey towards being confident, competent, credible, creative and curious learners by developing a wider perspective on skills to succeed and demonstrate credibility to future employers. 

This unit will aim for students to develop what it means to be a credible students and how students can learn how to be trusted to participate in a variety of learning communities and to adhere to professional codes of conduct.  

Students will take control of what professionalism means to their chosen career pathway, and continue to develop their curious mind set on what it means to study and work within a professional community.

The approach of this unit is to ensure students gain the knowledge and skills to maintain their academic integrity and successfully navigate the professional world of business.  Throughout this unit students will build their own academic glossary to take with them on their learning journey.

Students will move onto higher levels of education fully understanding ethical integrity and the rigours of fulfilling academic codes of practice.  

Aspiring To Succeed

As a new student you may have several thoughts buzzing through your mind, you may be wondering if you have made the right choice on embarking on this learning journey, you may be thinking will this course help me achieve my dream job that I desire? Whatever the scenario may be, this unit will help you have a clear vision, by taking you on an adventure of exploring what your aspirations are and what you need to do to achieve them, so that the world of work can be an oyster in your own hands. 

This unit will assist students to become a confident, competent, credible, creative, and curious learners who have a clear vision of opportunities available to them in the world of graduate work and the skills needed to enable them to follow and achieve their dreams. 

It will encourage you to appreciate the different sectors and roles available to work in and support you to understand the skills that are needed in different job roles. This unit will give you the chance to review your job interests against your current skill set and highlight what you need to develop or improve on. It will set you with the foundation that you need to know about employability skills and what is out there in the world beyond your current job role and how your desires and aspirations can be achieved. 

This unit will run alongside the other first semester unit with the aim of providing an insight into graduate job roles and linking it to student aspirations. You will find that while studying this unit you will grow as learner and develop resilience and be stretched and challenged on the way of exploring your aspirations and ways of meeting them by developing the skills and planning to develop those skills. This will help you with further studies and the world of work. 

Applied Numeracy For Business

This unit is part of a core spine of units that all Business students will encounter as part of their learning journey. This journey takes you through the begin stage at Level 4, to the thrive stage at level 5, to succeed stage at level 6.  
This unit is designed to support your Begin stage at level 4, it develops the numeracy skills and abilities you need to succeed in your studies and in the business world. The unit is designed to support you and develop your confidence in essential mathematics and statistics techniques, it applies these techniques in business context to give you an understanding of how they are used to solve problems and make decision in business organisations.

The connected core spine of units also enables you to network with peers from across the faculty just as you will be expected to work with colleagues throughout the organisation in the world of business.¿¿¿ 

The unit aims to achieve 

• provide students with the fundamental knowledge and understanding of numeracy in business.   
• develop student confidence in a range of numerical and statistical techniques.
• enable students apply a range of numerical and statistical techniques to practical business problems.   

English Legal System

This unit aims to:

1.       Provide students with a solid understanding of the working of the English Legal System, the concepts of statutory interpretation and judicial precedent and the roles of those who play a part in the legal system.

2.       Provide students with the ability to use primary and secondary legal sources, including some electronic retrieval systems.

3.       Provide students with the ability to evaluate the law whilst developing their skills of legal research, oral and written communication, group work, statistical analysis, reflective learning and study skills. 

4.       Students should also acquire a willingness to accept responsibility for their own learning and enable them to learn independently using their initiative and self-discipline.

Beginning Your Professional Business Journey

This unit is part of a core spine of units that all Business students will encounter as part of their learning journey. This journey takes you from the Begin stage at Level 4, to the Thrive stage at Level 5 through to the Succeed stage at Level 6. This unit is designed to support the Begin/Thrive/Succeed stage by introducing you to the skills that you will require in order to develop your professional practice.

The connected core spine of units also enables you to network with peers from across the faculty just as you will be expected to work with colleagues throughout the organisation in the world of business.  

This unit will help you to begin your journey in Business and provide you with the support you will need to develop your professional practice.

In this unit you will be presented with Business challenges which will allow you to collaborate with peers, and provide an insight in to a professional Business environment. 

Human Resource Management Foundations

Success as a Human Resource professional depends on understanding the issues within organisations relating to staff and management and developing the skills, behaviour and knowledge that are required by HR professionals.

This unit aims to give you an insight into the role of Human Resource Management and the key areas that underpin the CIPD HR professional standards.  

The Role Of Hr In The Digital Age

As technology continues to shape society, including, the way people work and interact with organization and businesses, there is a need for HR to embrace digitisation.

This unit aims to give students an insight into the role of how Human Resource Management has evolved and is developing in line with changes in technology.

Planning Careers And Employability

Employability a key feature of the University of Bedfordshire Business School. You have these special units in each year of your course. In your second year, the unit topics focus on choosing and managing your future applications; particularly for graduate schemes and for professional roles. Within this unit you will consider current developments in recruitment and practise preparing applications in various forms. This will include preparation for interview situations; whether by telephone, video, assessment centre or one to one interview. With the involvement of local employers, you will gain real insight into your own employability, develop into a business-ready graduate and be able to get that important first job.

Employment Law

This unit is designed to provide students with an opportunity for the advanced study of the law governing the employment relationship and the regulation of working life.
In addition to gaining a detailed knowledge of the principles and norms of employment law, throughout the unit students will be encouraged to develop an understanding of the political, economic and social issues that have shaped the development of this area of law.

The influence of European law will be considered throughout the unit, which will also discuss and develop broader theoretical issues, such as the balance between regulating the employment relationship and leaving discretion to the contracting parties to exercise their own judgements in specific cases.

Immigration And Asylum Law

This unit provides an in-depth introduction to asylum and immigration law in the United Kingdom by exploring both the relevant UK legislation and the international and EU law standards which impact and inform the UK legal system.

Throughout the unit, you will explore the key legal concepts underpinning asylum and immigration law, and the historical, social and political context in which this particularly topical area of law operates. By locating UK asylum and immigration law in the broader context of global migration trends and the current refugee crisis, you will be able to appreciate the extra-legal factors and different perspectives which influence law and practice in the field. This will allow you to gain both a solid knowledge of the law and critical understanding of the flaws, gaps and challenges in the current system.

The Asylum and Immigration Law unit provides an excellent opportunity for those who are planning to pursue a career as a legal practitioner. Quite apart from the wealth of professional opportunities in the fields of immigration and asylum, issues of immigration law are relevant to a number of other legal areas, including Employment Law, Family Law, Criminal law and Constitutional Law. Therefore, a working understanding of the core concepts and norms of this area of law will be an asset for your future legal career. 

Innovative Practice In Hrm And Hrd

Contemporary work organisations are concerned with excellent performance, competitive advantage and added value and how this might be sustained in the global context. From the perspective of HRM and HRD we are concerned with how high performance working might support organisational performance in this highly competitive environment.

Knowledge, learning, creativity, innovation and employee engagement are increasingly recognised as central to innovative practice. The role of HR practitioners is to understand how to manage and share knowledge, and how to create knowledge through learning and the generation of new ideas.

This unit provides an introduction to the concepts and skills necessary to support your learning, personal and professional development as a competent practitioner in innovative practice. This unit combines theoretical knowledge to support your understanding of these important concepts with skill development that builds your self-confidence and competence. You will encounter a variety of approaches to learning including practical experiences, workshop activities and independent learning. In this way this unit will equip you with the knowledge and skills necessary for innovative practice so that you can apply these to your learning in other units to understand how these contribute to high performance working that is sustainable.

This unit aims to:

• Develop a critical understanding of how organisations can create a high-performance work organisation
• Evaluate the contribution of high-performance working on organisational performance, competitive advantage and employee engagement
• Develop operational and strategic insights into how learning and knowledge can be leveraged to achieve maximum impact on individual and group behaviour and support organisational performance
• Evaluate the contribution of creativity and innovation to organisational performance, competitive advantage and employee engagement
• Develop an understanding of how to enhance creative thinking in yourself and colleagues through analysis of practical, cognitive or emotional blocks to creative idea generation and how these might be overcome using structured techniques.
• Develop a critical understanding of how to build a high-performance culture supportive of creativity, innovation, learning and knowledge creation.

People Resourcing And Development

A fundamental part of the human resource management (HRM) role is concerned with resourcing and developing people. To drive sustained performance, the organisation must be able to access the skills it needs at the time and in the places that it needs them. This unit will provide you with an overview of the way different organisations are managing resourcing and development activities and which practices are the most effective in a variety of different organisational and environmental contexts. To achieve these, organisation requires insight-driven strategic and operational activity. Organisations are obliged to compete with one another to secure the services of a workforce in labour markets that are continually evolving Consequently, In particular, the unit aims to:

• Introduce the strategic approaches that organisations take to position themselves as employers in the labour market
• Introduce the key operational tools, techniques and practices that organisations use to resource their organisations effectively
• Build a broad understanding of the factors to be considered when implementing and evaluating inclusive learning and development activities within varying contexts.

Overall, the main concern of this unit is to provide an overview of the way organisations are managing the different HR activities and to identify thew most effective and efficient way to do so within diverse context.

The Strategic Context Of Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management (HRM) is a dynamic area, changing constantly, to deal with the ever changing needs of business management. Human Resources (HR) professionals need to understand key strategic issues in the organisational and external environments within which HR operates. This unit has been designed to give you an understanding of strategic HRM approaches in different business contexts both from an academic and practical perspective.

This unit aims to:

Introduce the role of the HR function in traditional and contemporary organisational contexts.

Introduce major theoretical perspectives and contemporary debates in the field of strategic HRM and how these inform HR practice.

Build a sound understanding of the business and external factors affecting organisations and to assess the impacts of these factors on the HR function.

Develop a critical perspective of the key developments in the business and external context within which HR operates.

Enable recognition of the different HR approaches evolving in different settings, and to understand the changing employment relationship.

Employment Relations

A fundamental part of the human resource management (HRM) role is an understanding of and an ability to manage the employment relationship. The employment relationship could be a complex one. This can be a social relationship as well as an economic one which operates in a wide variety of contexts, industrial sectors, labour markets and economic conditions both within and beyond local and national boundaries. In the UK and EU, it is also a heavily regulated relationship. HR professionals must be equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that allows them to contribute towards successful management of this relationship.
This unit will allow you to develop the understanding and skills you will require to make informed and effective judgements about existing and emerging models, processes and practices of employment relations and employee reward in local and international jurisdictions.
The unit aims to:

• Build on your knowledge and experience to develop the skills required to make informed and effective judgements about existing and emerging models, processes and practices of employment relations in a variety of contexts.
• Encourage you to assess and understand broader developments which influence the effective management of the employment relationship.
• Introduce perspectives, principles and policies of employee reward from a theoretical and strategic focus and how to implement them in practice.
• Encourage you to assess the contribution of reward strategies and practices to sustained organisational performance and advise on the appropriateness of policies and practices to line managers to promote employee performance.
• Introduce the major areas of employment legislation and the employment law system, focusing in particular on ways in which day-to-day HR activities are subjected to some form of regulation.

International Human Rights Law

International human rights law (IHRL) is a specialist branch of public international law which is designed to promote and protect the fundamental rights and human dignity of all individuals, without discrimination. Although the initial aim of IHRL was to protect individuals against abuses by the State, in its contemporary form IHRL requires States to take action to protect individuals from abuses committed by private parties and to adopt positive measures aimed at ensuring the effective enjoyment of rights.

Through international action and incorporation in the domestic legal systems of States, international human rights standards inform almost every aspect of everyday life. IHRL is relevant to an ever-increasing range of situations, spacing from the protection of life during law-enforcement operations, to prevention of discrimination, the right to family life, education, working conditions, freedom of expression and religious manifestation.

The IHRL unit covers all of these aspects, with the aim of equipping you with a solid working knowledge of the fundamental principles and mechanisms for the protection and promotion of human rights.

The unit is divided into two parts: Part I addresses the theoretical debate on the nature of human rights, the historical development of IHRL and the institutional framework for the protection of human rights at the global and at the regional level. Part II examines in detail some of the most important human rights and their application in practice. We will not cover all of the fundamental rights which are guaranteed by international human rights law; rather, we will analyse in-depth selected rights and freedoms which illustrate theories, principles, law and practice.

The unit will provide you with a solid grounding in the key principles and norms of IHRL. In addition, by developing your knowledge of the practical application of the international legal protections for fundamental rights and freedoms, the unit aims to enable you to make full use, in your future career, of the potential of IHRL in litigation and advocacy, both at the domestic and the international level.

Company Law

Company Law is relevant to you as future legal practitioner specialising in commercial and business matters, or simply if you have an interest in general business matters.

The unit aims to provide you with an understanding of the nature and functions of a company in running a business, and of the legal framework which regulates companies. The need to inform those who run a business is seen as essential. In particular, corporate personality and liability will be emphasised. The liability of those who promote the creation of the company will be examined in order to appreciate the true significance of the company as a legal entity.  The steps involved in its creation will be examined in some depth.  The growth of civil and criminal liability imposed upon its directors will be examined and the rationale for liability analysed.  The role of the Criminal Justice Act 1993 and its attempt to consider insider dealing will be assessed. The impact of the Companies Act 2006 will also play an important role in this unit along with the Enterprise Act 2002.

The director’s managerial role will be examined along with the concept of ‘thinking small’ and stakeholder relations in society.  Along with the need for companies to grow, this is crucial to understanding the modern company format and its role as a part of society. Should its business fail the impact of compulsory and voluntary liquidation will be examined including the role of the insolvency practitioner.

Developing Professional Human Resource Management Practice

The purpose of this unit is to prepare you for an organisational role within the HR profession. It is designed to help you gain a better understanding of the role of the HR professional and what skills are required to work within the sector; learn about conflict resolution and how to create your own personal development plan.

The unit has three areas of emphasis: personal and professional development; understanding the practicalities of the HR profession; and personal and professional effectiveness. The unit will enable you to plan, and reflect on, your own personal and professional development as you enter the final year of the course and take the first steps towards becoming an HR professional. You will develop a sound understanding of the knowledge, skills and behaviours required by HR professionals (as described in the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development HR Profession Map) as you also put them into practice in this and other units. You will develop your knowledge and understanding of the role and management of the HR function with particular emphasis on the practical side of contributing to sustained organisational performance through effective change management as well as by ensuring an ethical and professional approach to HRM and HRD. Finally, you will gain and develop practical skills which will enhance your personal and professional effectiveness and ready you for a career in the HR profession.

Dissertation In Human Resource Management

The purpose of the Dissertation in HRM unit is to give you the opportunity to carry out an in-depth study of an applied nature, synthesising your learning from other units, yet pursuing one area of interest in depth.  The dissertation ensures that you identify, call upon and combine knowledge and skills from other units (and where appropriate, from work experience) to produce an independent work of practical relevance, yet with academic depth and rigour. The optional work placement in year 3 (sandwich year) provides a possible context for the research project, to be completed in year 4. For all other students the research project should be completed in year 3.

The dissertation, perhaps more than any other part of your course, allows greater scope for expression of skills, knowledge and abilities and offers the chance for you to develop, in an original and creative way, an area of particular interest.  It also performs the important integrative function of bringing together different elements from your course and demonstrating your ability and discipline in producing a relatively long and detailed study. This dissertation contributes significantly to the final degree. A sound dissertation is also a valuable job seeking aid in providing evidence of your ability to successfully undertake project work.

The unit aims:

To deepen your learning through a detailed and comparative study of an area of HRM of particular interest

To enable you to critically evaluate the core knowledge at the forefront of your area of interest in informing your investigation, demonstrating an awareness of the provisional nature of knowledge.

To enable you to independently select, plan, manage and execute an in-depth research investigation of your own choice with potential for useful or unique outcomes

To enable you to critically review evidence, including reliability, validity and significance, and interpret with reference to the core knowledge in the area, identifying contradictions and inconsistencies and exploring possible reasons, leading to reasoned conclusions and recommendations

To develop an awareness of your personal responsibility and professional ethical codes of conduct, particularly in relation to confidentiality and informed consent.
 

Management And Leadership

This unit aims to provide students with a critical perspective on the theories and practices associated with contemporary management and leadership. The unit encompasses some of the main theories, frameworks and practices of management and leadership as well as key factors in persuasive communication and the enthusing of other people.  Through case studies and exercises on contemporary organisational issues, students will be encouraged to solve problems by applying management and leadership principles and models and by adopting a critical stance to the commonly accepted pre-suppositions and practices in management and leadership theories.

Hr Analytics And Data

In the digital economy businesses can create value through data and analytics therefore, it is crucial that HR professionals play a key role in demonstrating people value through data. 

This unit aims to help students  understand and use the fundamentals of HR Analytics, how data is utilised in the HR environment as well as ethical issues and limitations when using HR/people information.