Master of Business Administration (MBA)
Cardiff, United Kingdom
DURATION
1 up to 2 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time, Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Request application deadline
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
GBP 31,950 / per year *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* for overseas | for home: £19,200
Introduction
Are you an ambitious professional looking to progress to senior leadership and drive positive business change? If this sounds like you then the Cardiff MBA is a great next step.
Whatever your managerial background, we offer a challenging experience that will stretch and support you, developing your business knowledge, increasing your self-awareness and sharpening your ability as an effective and inspiring leader along the way.
Take this opportunity to thrive alongside like-minded, experienced professionals as you consider the wider commercial, social and environmental impacts of decision-making on global business.
The business of changing the world is ours. Together we can make a difference.
We believe that effective learning is founded on two things: your involvement in diverse and challenging experiences and the way you make sense of these experiences, individually and with others.
With that in mind, the Cardiff MBA is delivered in immersive blocks designed to stimulate your curiosity, inform your process of enquiry and strengthen the application of your learning. You’ll find that each block of learning involves a wide variety of activities including company visits, industry speakers, time-limited challenges, role-play and simulations.
You’ll benefit from small group work and block teaching allowing you to master specific interdisciplinary approaches before an opportunity to develop a specialisation via our accelerator project. The programme concludes with a capstone module bringing together the segments of expertise acquired over the course of your MBA experience.
The diversity of our student cohort and our academic staff is a real asset. Opportunities to collaborate with peers, academics and practitioners to challenge your existing knowledge structures, assumptions, values and skills will help you to reconsider your current understanding and to explore issues from different perspectives.
Our MBA is designed to tackle real-world challenges, and this is reflected in our assessment of your work. Reflecting on the workplace, you’ll work individually and as part of a team to complete assessment tasks spanning strategy, personnel, consultancy, innovation and crisis.
This structure enables you to customise your MBA programme on six challenge-focused modules with in-built flexibility to suit your career aspirations.
Why Study this Course
Tackle leadership challenges and consider the economic, social and environmental impact of global business.
Accelerator Project
Consolidate your learning and professional experiences as you respond to a complex, multi-faceted problem posed by a business client.
A Cardiff Welcome
Springboard into the programme and learning community with a custom-made orientation and team-building programme.
AACSB-Accredited
Awarded to less than 5% of the world’s business schools, AACSB accreditation is a hallmark of business school excellence.
AMBA-Accredited
Our MBA is accredited by the Association of MBAs, one of the world’s leading authorities on postgraduate business education.
Admissions
Scholarships and Funding
We are committed to investing up to a total of £500,000 in this high-value competitive scholarship scheme to support UK students who are planning to start an eligible Master’s programme in 2024/25.
The Scholarships are each worth £3,000 and will be awarded in the form of a tuition fee discount.
Eligibility
UK students are eligible to apply for the Scholarship. You normally need to have achieved at least a 2.1 or equivalent in your first degree to be eligible. You need to submit an application to study at Cardiff University and be made an offer to study before your fee status can be confirmed.
Curriculum
The Cardiff MBA is structured around a series of six challenge-focussed modules, based on cross-functional and action-based scenarios typically found in the workplace. A number of themes will provide integration across the modules. These may include Responsible Leadership, Digital Transformation and The Future of Work. Choice and specialisation are embedded in modules. For example, the ‘Confronting Grand Challenges’ module will provide you with the opportunity to focus on a challenge that has particular relevance for your future career.
The learning required to engage with the challenges is experienced in immersive blocks designed to stimulate your curiosity, inform your process of enquiry and strengthen the application of your learning.
Core Modules for Year One
- Global Challenges and Strategic Decision-Making
- People Perspectives
- Financial and Business Analytics
- Creativity, Innovation and Enterprise
- Confronting Grand Challenges
- The Accelerator Project
- Leading Change and Transforming Futures
- Leadership Development Programme
How Will I Be Assessed?
The block programme structure provides plenty of opportunities for you to reflect on your learning and development informally. Short knowledge/skill review activities are built into each module to help you check your progress and improve your approach to learning. This will build your confidence and enhance your approach to formal assessment tasks.
Realistic work problems form the basis of formal module assessments. You will be expected to show extended academic reflection on each task, and also adopt typical business formats to present your findings, including oral presentations, and written reports.
Assessment tasks require you to work individually and as part of a team, just as you would in the workplace.
All formal assessments are completed within each module block. This enables more in-depth consolidation and application required for successful performance in assessment tasks based on the complex work undertaken by business leaders. It also reflects realistic workplace timescales for the completion of tasks.
Program Outcome
What Skills Will I Practise and Develop?
The Learning Outcomes for this Programme describe what you will be able to do as a result of your study at Cardiff University. They will help you to understand what is expected of you.
The Learning Outcomes for this Programme can be found below:
Knowledge & Understanding
On successful completion of the programme you will be able to:
- Draw on discipline-based knowledge and management experience to design integrated solutions to complex organisational problems
- Critically evaluate current management frameworks, models, debates and evidence and integrate them with practice
- Critically evaluate contrasting research and consultancy skills for engaging with multi-faceted business problems
- Analyse the complex environmental context that informs strategic decision-making in organisations and practice
- Demonstrate a holistic awareness of challenges faced by businesses in making both an economic and social contribution
Intellectual Skills
On successful completion of the programme you will be able to:
- Find and discriminate between competing sources of research and consulting evidence
- Analyse methods for generating primary data and management information
- Critically analyse and synthesise contrasting perspectives and their supporting evidence
- Integrate theory and diverse workplace experiences
- Develop compelling arguments to support viable and creative plans of action to convince and brief a range of audiences
Professional Practical Skills
On successful completion of the programme you will be able to:
- Evaluate the practical applications of theory and practice to generate practice-based solutions to unstructured problems
- Demonstrate proactivity and the ability to take the initiative
- Demonstrate responsible and ethical leadership
- Identify and address personal and professional development needs
- Develop credible methods for gathering primary data
- An ability to make decisions in challenging situations
- Work effectively in a leadership team
Transferable/Key Skills
On successful completion of the programme you will be able to:
- Solve problems creatively
- Communicate to diverse audiences through a range of media
- Demonstrate self-reflection and self-awareness
- Work independently and collaboratively
- Use digital technology
- Manage self and others
Program Tuition Fee
Career Opportunities
At Cardiff Business School, you’ll receive a career-changing MBA education from world-leading academics who have different points of view. They’ll challenge your thinking as you consider the world of business from a range of alternative perspectives.
The Cardiff MBA is designed with your future in mind. You’ll benefit from our Career Advantage Service (CAS), which gives you access to the knowledge and expertise of a career consultant and coach for personalised professional development.
Alongside the CAS, a bespoke, wrap-around Leadership Development Programme will help you assess your leadership capability, develop a personal development path and build key leadership skills.
We’ve developed relationships that range from the largest multinationals to the smallest micro-businesses, and include a wide variety of social enterprises and cooperatives. We use these networks to deliver value for our students through:
- Real-world case studies and insights
- Collaboration with our Public Value Entrepreneurs in Residence
- Guest lectures
- Field trips and workshops
Completing this wide-ranging and varied learning experience will enable you to apply for more senior positions or seek a transformative career change.
This programme is designed for those with existing work experience. Successful completion of the programme will enable you to apply for more senior positions or seek a transformative career change.
Program delivery
How Will I Be Taught?
An active learning approach is embedded in the Cardiff MBA. We believe that effective learning is founded on two things – your involvement in diverse and challenging experiences, and the way you make sense of those experiences, both individually and with others. A team that includes academics from multiple disciplines, and practitioners representing a range of functions and sectors will facilitate each module. This will reflect workplace practice and encourage the cross-fertilisation of different perspectives.
You will find that each block of learning involves a wide variety of activities including company visits, industry speakers, time-limited challenges, role-play, and simulations. These are all designed to reconsider your existing understanding and to explore issues from different perspectives. The diverse backgrounds within the student cohort make a valuable contribution here.
We will help you to enhance your higher-order reflective skills, including observation, analysis, and synthesis to develop comprehensive conclusions about these experiences.
We will also encourage you to reflect collaboratively with peers, academics and practitioners to challenge your existing knowledge structures, assumptions, values and skills. This will also enable you to negotiate and build new insights into the nature of leadership and business practice and develop creative responses to business problems.
You will have opportunities to integrate and apply new understandings, together with skills from the Leadership Development workshops, in practical tasks embedded in each learning block, and formal coursework challenges around which each module is designed.