Register for a Professional Development Course Today!

CURRENT STUDENTS: UIC Liautaud is offering experimental two-credit professional development courses this fall for ALL graduate students (MBA, MSA, and MS-MIS programs). These courses are designed to prepare students to successfully navigate the transition to a new professional opportunity, and they are most valuable early in a student’s experience at UIC Liautaud.

Deadline to register for MBA 590 courses is October 25. Contact Liautaud Student Services to register or for more information on any of these exciting upcoming professional development courses. 

Applied Consulting
Wednesday 10/23-12/11
Instructor: John Fyfe

The MBA 590 – Applied Consulting course, starting October 23, will be conducted as a guided workshop for students to work in a professional consulting role to address a real life client business issue. Each student will work on 4-5 member teams (depending on the number of students enrolled) as consultants to create, manage and execute a client engagement that addresses the business issue. Each week, each team will work on producing an interim deliverable, such as they would to a real client. Each team will then produce a final project report with recommendations, which they will present during the last class or at a time arranged with the client. Potential projects include:

• Development of a business model, marketing strategy and review of the technical requirements for a new initiative started by a member of the UIC entrepreneurship Hall of Fame.  The initiative involves the development of a web site and program to match business leaders as mentors for students and other mentees.
• This same member of the Hall of Fame also recently purchased an Oil/Gas distribution company.  This company is in need of a logistics strategy for how to most efficiently get their products to their customers.
• Design of a web site and development of strategies for incorporating the site into an integrated marketing campaign for a forensic auditing company which is owned by a UIC graduate who is a member of the CBA’s Business Advisory Council.
• Analysis of operations/business processes for a full-service moving and office relocation company, focusing particularly on the interfaces between the operations and invoicing functions in order to increase the speed with which revenue is collected.
• Assist an entrepreneur with developing a business model and performing a market analysis for a venture to allow environmentally conscious customers to lease electric cars with the option to use gas-powered cars for longer trips
• Development of an outreach and membership strategy as well as a review of alternatives and selection of a CRM application to support this strategy for a not-for-profit organization that promotes collaboration of architects and others to design and build out public spaces in Chicago
• Development of a business model and operating processes for a not-for-profit organization that serves as an incubator for aspiring performance artists to develop and bring to market their plays, dance programs, etc.

The list of projects will be finalized in the next week or two.

Contact John Fyfe for more information.

Introduction to Business Analytics
Tuesday 10/22-12/10
Instructor: Murad Gharibeh

The tools of statistics and data analysis are increasingly more important for business managers, and this course is designed to provide those who have not previously studied in these areas with tools that they will need both for their MBA studies and in addressing analytical challenges in their work.  The course covers basic tools of statistics:  distributions and relationships, probability and sampling distributions,  hypothesis testing, regression, etc.  In working with data analysis, it covers collecting and organizing data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions and predict the future, and present findings.

Social Entrepreneurs Leading Change
Monday 10/21-12/9
Instructor: Anna Lloyd

Nearly all business students today will be involved in social enterprise activities at some point in your career.  The integration of social enterprise tools into traditional business curriculum is essential: some of you will pursue direct employment in this area; others will remember this curriculum as you decide to join a nonprofit board or serve as the director or chief operating officer of a service delivery organization. And, some of you will earn your living, building a career, from serving as a social entrepreneur while encouraging others to do the same.

The integration of for profit management theory with nonprofit service delivery is a direct nod to our human interest in personal values and accountability. Our challenges are certainly economic as we return to the market with an MBA; however they are equally personal, as we consider how we best lead as entrepreneurs and change agents in our work places and communities. Social entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in developing present and future leaders required to ensure that business remains a force for good.

Jim Collins’ monograph, Good to Great in the Social Sectors, along with Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s work on adaptive leadership, Leadership On the Line, offer unique scholarship to review both the theory and personal leadership practice of social entrepreneurship. Integrative leadership, the development of business skills with public policy and philanthropy skills, supports our attention to cross boundary, multi sector, entrepreneurship and enhances our ability to build teams and attract investment.

Web Analytics
Monday 10/21-12/9
Instructor: Doug Lundquist

Modern firms rely heavily on the Internet to promote their products. Their own websites are especially important, since visitors can reveal their interests by their browsing behavior. Web analytics gathers and processes this information to learn more about their customers. This analysis allows assessing a website’s effectiveness along metrics like web traffic and how long customers spend at pages. Web analytics offers a source of competitive advantage for both gaining new customers and keeping existing ones. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of web analytics. Students will learn to use Google’s online and offline software tools. The course will emphasize how these tools help inform marketing decisions. Course topics include:

• Key concepts and terms and their usage
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their importance
• Visitor behavior analysis
• Developing and aligning KPIs with strategic objectives