Coming This Fall | MBA 590 Course Offerings

Professional education prepares students to assume professional roles. Effective professionals in all fields demonstrate expertise beyond their academic training, expertise that they develop through experience, exposure to new situations and challenges and awareness of the demands and opportunities in the environment. In business, developing professional skills is critical to successfully launching and developing a career.

Knowing that the ROI for investing in graduate business education is landing a professional position that offers the opportunity to use and further develop one’s skills, UIC Liautaud is offering experimental two-credit professional development courses this fall. 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 Liautaud.

Coming This Fall MBA 590 Course Offerings for Fall 2013

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

The Applied Consulting course is an introduction to the client-consultant engagement process typically used by consulting and professional services firms.  Students who aspire to go into the consulting industry will particularly benefit from this course, as will those who intend to serve as an internal consultant or operations analyst within any public or private sector organization.  However, since most public and private sector management personnel end up working on projects for their organizations at some time in their careers , this course will be of interest to all MBA students.

The class will be conducted as a guided workshop for students to work in a professional consulting role to address a real life client problem as a case study. Each student will work in a team with some other students (depending on the number of students enrolled) working as consultants to create, manage and execute a client engagement that addresses their problem. Each week, each team will work on producing some 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

Creating Careers That Count, Tuesday 8/27 – 10/15.  Instructor:  Dave Kreischer

In a highly dynamic, well-educated and globally competitive marketplace, relevance has replaced loyalty as a basis for relationships—which includes the contract between employee and employer.  Since the marketplace dictates what is relevant, you are free to create a career that really counts for you as long as it counts for the marketplace.  This eight-week course will explore the three steps to creating a career that counts for you and for the marketplace:

• Defining your difference-making strategy
• Discovering your marketplace relevance
• Demonstrating and delivering your difference-making capability with highly relevant impact.

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.

Managing Enterprise Data and Analytics, Monday 8/26 – 10/14. Instructor:  Kyle Cheek

Enterprises are increasingly turning their attention from the capture and maintenance of business data to a focus on very sophisticated analysis of that data. This shift is motivated by a belief that the vast quantities of data created through transactional, operational, web, and other sources contains valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and new operational efficiencies. This course will provide a survey of the emerging practice of business analytics, covering topics including: business data, its sources, its potential, and its challenges; a comparative view of analytic practices and maturity across industries; and critical considerations in the management of analytics within a business.

Personal Financial Planning, Wednesday 8/28-10/16. Instructor:  Sid Blum

Personal financial planning touches the lives of all individuals and households. It includes the planning for accumulation of assets and debts. Budgeting and planning for income and costs to maintain a lifestyle desired during one’s life and for live events such as education, housing, risk management, marriage, family, personal goals, and death. The course will touch on all areas of financial planning that a professional financial advisor is required to be knowledgeable in order to advise their clients and be part of a professional practice. The course is designed to help individuals understand the financial planning process and the areas covered in a typical financial planning engagement and some of the compliance, ethics and business requirements that a fee only financial planning entity would encounter.

Project Management, Wednesday 8/28 – 10/16.  Instructor:  John Fyfe

The project management discipline is a twenty-first century core business process because it enables profit generation by maintaining tight controls on expenditures with a proactive view of project events, allowing organizations to manage initiatives with predictable outcomes, in terms of costs, time and other resources.

This course provides an introduction to the project management discipline, and specifically to the concepts inherent in the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification process.  The course focuses on real-world cases to build the foundational skills for students to be able to participate effectively in projects and ultimately to manage them.

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

This course focuses on the integration of social enterprise tools into traditional business curriculum, an  essential component of a business school curriculum:  some students will pursue direct employment in this area; others will remember the curriculum as they decide to join a nonprofit board or serve as the director or chief operating officer of a service delivery organization.  This eight-week course is one that looks at integrative leadership, the development of business skills with public policy and philanthropy skills, which support cross-boundary, multi-sector entrepreneurship and enhance 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

For more information about the MBA 590 courses, please email us.