Unit assessment: You will complete an individual professional project that contains two cumulative components (i.e. assessment 1 will be the basis of assessment 2). You must use any feedback provided from assessment 1 to improve your work for assessment 2.
In this unit, you will demonstrate the synthesis of the knowledge, learning, business research methodologies, and professional skills that you have acquired and practiced throughout your Master course. In particular, this unit builds upon your previous work in the unit ‘Research in Business’ but the Professional Project will be based SOLELY on secondary sources of information. You will work independently to plan, carry out and report on an investigation that addresses a significant issue or problem in business relevant to your future profession (this will be one of the following: marketing, HR, accounting or management). Throughout the term, your independent study will be complemented by a series of webinars and interactions with a campus tutor, who will provide guidance.
Assessment 1: Project context and proposal (40%)
This is an individual, written assessment, to be completed in report format. The required length of the report is 1,250 to 1,750 words (excluding title page, preliminaries, tables, figures, reference list and appendices). In-text referencing and a full reference list, provided in APA style, are required.
The purpose of this assessment is to provide the contextual background to YOUR future profession, alongside a proposal detailing the topic of YOUR professional project.
In order to successfully complete assessment 1, you are required to reflect upon your course (program) of study and the ‘profession’ that is associated with this course. This requires you to explore the notion of ‘profession’ in general, alongside your future career pathways and the specific profession, towards which you are studying. In particular, you are required to write a report including the following:
1. Project context (500 – 750 words; at least 5 high-quality academic and/or practitioner references): Identify and explore YOUR future profession (marketing, HR, accounting or management)
• Produce a critical review of your understanding of what it means to ‘become a professional’ in YOUR future profession
2. Project proposal (750 – 1,000 words; at least 10 high-quality academic, peer-reviewed journal articles): Identify a problem or issue – this must be CRUCIALLY relevant to your profession – which your professional project will address, and write the following:
• Clear and concise working title for your project
• Background and definition of the issue/problem, including a justification why this issue/problem is crucially relevant to your profession
• Your project’s proposed aim and objectives/research questions
• A preliminary critical literature review on this issue/problem, particularly highlighting any gaps in the literature
• An overview of how you will be proceeding with your project, including secondary information sources, approaches to analyse them, major milestones and a Gantt chart schedule