It’s been a turbulent decade for businesses – not only in the UK, but worldwide. Starting with a sub-prime mortgage crisis, we’ve seen recession, political unrest and any number of events that have affected businesses long after the news stopped reporting them.

Many businesses still struggle today with lower than expected salaries, squeezed profits and a difficult sales environment.

Businesses need strong leadership now more than ever and there have been thousands of articles exploring how workplaces, businesses and the C-Suite have changed through the years of Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and now Generation Z coming into the workplace.

While traditionally, promotions came from within and leadership skills were augmented with training, companies are searching for the right candidates with the right skillsets to hit the ground running.

A new kind of Masters degree

This is why we have introduced three dedicated Masters programmes in Leadership and Management, giving you access to the world-class knowledge of our academics and allowing those who want a career boost the opportunity to progress.

The major difference with our MSc courses is that we deliver all areas of the programme online and design them to fit in around your current career – so there’s no need to take time off to study. Learning in your spare time and at your convenience removes a lot of the strain of studying for a Masters degree in the traditional sense, making it the perfect choice if you’re a working professional or looking to make an ambitious career change.

Earning and learning: flexibility built in

Flexibility is at the heart of our online MSc programmes, and the ability to keep working in your current job role while studying makes a big difference in terms of committing to the time that a Masters degree needs. Another major benefit of exclusively online learning resources is that it doesn’t tie you into a traditional school timetable; you can choose to begin your course on one of six start dates.

We’ve also reduced the financial commitment required to study for a Masters degree; not only can you keep your current salary grade, but our online MSc courses are pay-per-module, removing the need to make significant, up-front payments.

You can also choose one of three individual specialities – Innovation, Finance or International Business – giving you in-depth, high quality expertise in your chosen field, no matter where you want your career to take you.

An MSc without the stress

While many people would love to add a Masters degree to their CV, you may have concerns about commitments regarding time and money. These new courses ease those pressures and allow you to gain a top-class MSc from a Russell Group university without needing to leave home.

As companies struggle to thrive in what is still quite a difficult business environment, you’ll be giving your future career the best chance of blooming. Your demonstrable leadership skills, gained through a prestigious university, will put you one step closer to your dream career and allow you to steer your new company to even greater success.

Find out more and begin your application

Most people head to work each morning hoping to learn something new, make a difference or at least achieve some sort of progress. The desire to do a good job, learn and improve is the basis of professional pride and it’s one of the chief things that drives our need for career progression.

Your career may be in its early days or you may have been working hard and learning across a variety of roles for several years, but it’s likely that at some point you’ll want to make that transition into a more senior role, with more responsibilities and a higher salary. One thing that few people consider, however, is “Am I prepared to be a leader?”

A leadership mindset and skills to match

A startling figure estimates that around 50-60% of high level executives leave their position within the first 18 months of accepting the role and even a 25-year successful career can fail to prepare people for taking on top roles. Gil Amelio, CEO of Apple Computers was replaced by Steve Jobs in less than a year and Jack Griffin of Time Inc. lasted less than five months. There are many reasons why they had short-lived tenures, but successful leaders need a wide variety of skills to fulfil the role.

Experience is often assumed to be key to successfully taking on a senior management role, but experience alone is not enough to make a leader. It’s not just industry knowledge that leaders require, but also skills such as effective communication, the ability to negotiate, manage people and resources and think critically and objectively to solve unexpected problems.

Leadership is a teachable skillset

As a first step into leadership, it’s important for executives to have a good understanding of their company and be mentally prepared to support its needs. Other essential leadership capabilities need to be learned.

The University of York has created three 100% online MSc degree courses in Leadership and Management, to help fill the skills gap of the estimated 1.9m extra managers and directors that will be needed by 2024. As all teaching is delivered online, you have the flexibility to study when it suits you, meaning you can keep your current role and salary and learn in your spare time. The ability to earn-as-you-learn is also supported by a pay-per-module structure for all online courses, removing the need for large, up-front payments – you may also be entitled to a UK government backed postgraduate loan which covers the full cost of the course. What’s more, York alumni will receive a reduction in fees.

Gaining a Masters degree from a prestigious Russell Group university without having to take a career break and being able to apply what you learn in your current role will help equip you with the knowledge and skills required of a company leader. It will help you to demonstrate, when the time comes, your ability to take the reins in your new leadership role.

Find out more and begin your application

Ever since the USA and USSR began the Space Race in the 1950’s, it’s felt like the future has been hurtling towards us, but most predictions of life in the future have been very wrong! For every 1980’s kid still waiting for their predicted hoverboard, there’s another corresponding underestimation – such as IBM saying the world only needs a maximum of five computers, or that future computers could weigh as little as 1.5 tons.

This doesn’t mean businesses should simply wait for the future to arrive. The incredible pace at which computing, processing power and data compression have progressed has created opportunities for thousands of businesses to build, evolve and innovate products of their own. Innovation is now its own highly prized and sought after discipline.

Finding the next ‘big thing’

Businesses always want to be first to market, but nobody predicted mobile phones, let alone the iPhone – which was once branded ‘pointless’ as it had no physical QWERTY keyboard. Research and development is a way of predicting the future for companies; an integral part with the potential to create incredible success.

R&D isn’t interchangeable with innovation, however. Innovation is an individual discipline and a key business differentiator, supported by recent research that the companies who are the most innovative aren’t the ones that spend the greatest sums on R&D. Innovation is more about fresh and exciting thinking as opposed to incremental technical improvement – put simply, it’s an iPhone when compared to a slightly faster Blackberry emailer.

Innovation as a mindset

Companies that seek to be innovative need creativity. The ability to not only identify a problem that isn’t widely recognised, overcome physical or technical barriers with fresh thinking and critically evaluate potential solutions is exactly the kind of capability that can make a small company a world-beater. This isn’t to say that R&D isn’t valuable, but it takes an innovative mindset to apply their principles and what’s technically possible in a unique, new and disruptive manner.

The companies who score highly as ‘innovative’ whilst not giving over large percentages of turnover to R&D all share a few capabilities; taking a big picture approach to solving the problem is key and through collaboration, fresh design thinking, creative problem solving and even instilling ‘innovation’ as part of the company culture all make for an agile company.

The University of York and its world-class academics have created a 100% online MSc in Innovation, Leadership and Management to directly address the challenges faced by modern businesses today and to help meet their requirements. It covers key competencies such as effective communication and a critical approach to problem solving and enables you to study in your spare time, anywhere you like – meaning you don’t need to take a costly career break and can apply what you learn to your current role, proving your value to your employer. We’ve also made every section pay-per-module to remove the burden of large, up-front payments.

Businesses greatly value the ability to be innovative and are treating it as one of the basics of company culture; technology firms in particular don’t just want minor progress, they’re looking for something new, fresh, exciting and radical. Making changes and having innovation as a mindset proves that it’s a teachable skill that can be honed and perfected. The ability to demonstrate these very skills through a prestigious Russell Group Masters degree could be the very thing to boost your career!

To find out more and begin your application, simply click here.

When dealing with large businesses, the sheer number of employees and the required level of collaboration between individuals and departments makes leadership structures a necessity. Identifying responsibility for tasks, operations and people is part of the fabric of the business; each level of the leadership must work seamlessly to ensure projects and employees receive the guidance and progression they require. Large businesses usually build leadership frameworks over many years, adding to them as the business expands and creating a robust management team.

This works very well for established businesses, but what happens with much smaller teams and start-ups? A typical start-up venture begins as an idea, either of an individual or a small group that identifies a gap in the market. When very small groups work together, it’s much easier to communicate and people tend to naturally take on and share all the necessary roles or responsibilities. This works fine until the success of the new company means an influx of new staff.

Trying to retrofit a leadership structure that works for individuals, teams, departments and the entire company can be very difficult. Individual employees may find they lose some autonomy or find that somebody within the company is more qualified for a role they previously enjoyed. Young companies never want to risk upsetting employees who were there from the start, especially if they have business-critical knowledge, but re-assigning workflows and overhauling operations has the potential to do just that. Suddenly implementing an unfamiliar leadership paradigm can be quite jarring and can cause problems with productivity and efficiency while it takes effect.

The ideal situation is to build up strong leadership skills and prepare a start-up for expansion during the first few years of its existence. Having such structures in place while the company is young not only allows them to be tested and refined to make sure they work, but also means that processes for authorisation, communication and feedback are established before the potential for misunderstanding occurs.

Gaining high quality leadership skills such as effective communication or the ability to objectively assess and solve problems may be at the top of every start-up CEO’s wish list, but most don’t want to step away from their new business venture to go back to university to train.

The good news is that the University of York have three 100% online Masters degrees in Leadership and Management, covering specialisms in Innovation, Finance and International Business. As all learning materials are delivered entirely online, there’s no need to be on campus; you can learn in the evenings, at weekends or whenever you have some spare time and you’ll earn the exact same qualification as on-campus students.

All courses are delivered on a pay-per-module basis, to remove the financial burden of large, up-front payments and there are six start dates throughout the year, allowing you to begin whenever you’re ready. You can continue to give your start-up the attention it needs in its formative years, continue to grow the business by applying what you learn as you learn and by preparing for future expansion.

Find out more and begin your application

The first computer systems were simply a way of performing complicated mathematical problems more quickly. This means they were primarily of interest to international businesses or university technical departments, and computers weren’t seen as something that would one day become a huge industry in their own right or be relied upon by billions every single day.

This was the case until the first generation of tech whizz kids turned up. We’re all familiar with names such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded some of the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet, but the early days of these companies weren’t smooth sailing. Microsoft had multiple problems in the beginning and Apple was in danger of folding before their first commercial success. While these tech pioneers had fantastic ideas, technical knowledge and vision, they still hit many hurdles before they made a profit.

New frontiers, same story

Fast forward to today and the pattern has been repeated over and over. Visionaries of the DotCom boom and subsequent bust have struggled to make sustainable, profitable companies. Even Twitter, one of the most widespread social media platforms in the world, still struggles in the business world to replicate the profitability seen by many of its rivals.

This is why in order to make technological innovation successful, it’s vital to have an understanding of the business environment in which it will function and the leadership skills that will be required to bring the concept to life. When you’re designing a new product or service, knowing where it will fit into the wider business landscape, how it will generate revenue and the mechanics of things like taxes and reporting are extremely helpful. In the past, companies have relied on third parties for this expertise, but when it comes to technological innovation, it’s not always so simple.

Keeping the concept on track

When a new product is truly innovative, it can be tricky to fully explain its purpose during the planning stages. Using third party help may force you to follow existing avenues of business planning, which either mimic somebody else’s processes or simply aren’t right for the product being developed. This is where an understanding of the business environment and leadership skills are essential – not only does the innovator need an understanding of business environments, but they also need the leadership qualities and communication skills to ensure that the project stays on track.

This is one of the reasons the University of York has created an online MSc in Leadership and Management specifically focussed on innovation, to help aspiring leaders meet these challenges. By concentrating on the core skills of leadership, such as effective communication, objective approaches to problem-solving and strategic thinking, it greatly increases the chance of bringing new ideas and concepts to fruition.

As all learning materials are delivered entirely online, it allows you to study whenever it suits you, offering a prestigious Russell Group university degree with more flexibility. Being able to study in your spare time means you can gain valuable skills and experience without having to take an extended break from your work projects and risk another company or startup beating you to it! It also means that you can apply what you learn as you progress, potentially helping to avoid the problems that have hindered other innovative companies in their early days.

Each course features the option to pay-per-module, removing the burden of large, up-front payments. There are six start dates throughout the year, so you can begin whenever you’re ready.

The pace of technological evolution has increased dramatically in the last few decades. Products and services like the smartphone and social media have become popular beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. It’s difficult to predict where the next technological leap will come from, but with the right skills and qualifications, the tricky transition from concept to launch could become much more simple.

Find out more and begin your application

If you asked somebody to sum up what makes a person a good communicator, the first skills they list would usually be about speech. The ability to choose just the right words or explain yourself succinctly can be very useful when you need to make yourself understood, which may explain why leaders often prioritise verbal skills as part of their professional development. The problem is that in communication, speaking is only half the story.

Dialogues create solutions

The ability to speak clearly and have people engaged with a monologue is a crucial skill for an after-dinner speaker, but for leaders, communication is based around exchange. At the most basic level, good verbal skills reduce the chances of misunderstandings, but leaders need to also demonstrate active listening; this involves a level of feedback and monitoring of the conversation to ensure that the right information has been taken on. If you remove the listening part of this exercise, there’s no way to sense check that the intended meaning has been received and understood.

Making this a little more complex, many leadership roles require mentoring – using experience, technical knowledge and a little creative thinking to solve issues raised by employees. This is where effective communication in terms of both listening and speaking can be critical to success. Understanding the scale and impact of any problem requires strong listening skills, otherwise important details may be missed. The same is true when working to find a solution to a particular issue; the ability to listen effectively, absorb the information, synthesise a solution and then communicate that to others is a collaborative process that simply doesn’t work with a unidirectional approach to information.

Effective communications make great leaders

Many professionals in management or leadership roles find themselves working not only collaboratively, but also as a co-ordinator between individuals and teams. Effective communication at any number of different points is very important; failure to keep up ongoing dialogue between departments can lead to data silos, bottlenecks in workflows and teams arriving at milestone points at different times, which can cause confusion and expensive delays. If each department head only transmits their update without reading the information coming in from other teams, it makes the process redundant.

The sheer volume of data and information transmitted worldwide every day is astonishing, which means businesses need leaders with effective communication skills more than ever. Although you may believe that mastering and demonstrating effective communication would be difficult, it’s actually a core part of the University of York’s online MSc programmes in Leadership and Management.

These new Masters degrees are delivered 100% online, allowing you to gain a prestigious Russell Group qualification that you can apply directly to your role without having to take an extended study break. Being able to earn while you learn takes a lot of the financial pressure out of gaining a postgraduate degree, but the University of York also offers pay-per-module programme designs and six start dates per year, so you don’t need to save or wait to begin.

Almost every business is a communication business these days and the ability to not only thrive in this environment, but prove your expertise to your current (or even another) employer could put your career on the fast track!

Find out more and begin your application.