JWMI MBA in Human Resources

Your career and ability to lead depend on effective communication. Communication is a learned skill that everyone can improve. This course will teach you techniques, often reserved for high potential executives, to advance your leadership presence, strategic communication, professional relationships, presentation performance and workplace crisis management. You will sharpen your communication skills with targeted learning, practice and coaching. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to optimize your online presence through strategic updates to your LinkedIn profile and peer feedback.

Learn to attract the best people, reward the right behaviors and develop better leaders within your organization and see how the principles of differentiation, trust and candor drive winning results. This course is an introduction to people management, with a focus on putting people before numbers, nurturing talent and practicing fair and balance management. You will explore the concept of differentiation in employee management, examine ways to enhance the employee experience and determine the best metrics to track to achieve organizational goals.

Marketing is the process of turning wants and needs into decisions and actions. It involves a range of activities designed to convey a persuasive message to a target audience. The course covers marketing plans, qualitative and quantitative research, consumer psychology, product positioning and strategy, pricing, packaging, brand equity, advertising, the marketing mix, customer value and business-to-business global marketing.

Human Resources encompass much more than benefits and birthdays. A leader must find ways to navigate past this perception themselves with not only a seat at the table but as an independent confidant to the CEO. Students will explore how to align the competencies and behaviors of the workforce with the strategic goals of the organization. Also, Human Resource leaders need to develop themselves as the in-house experts in dealing with complex ethical and legal issues facing employers today. Students will examine the various regulatory agencies, policies, and guidelines impacting the workforce and identify ways to ensure compliance while driving results. Students will learn about the impact of Federal and State Regulations as they pertain to employee relations, compensation, hiring and terminations.

Financial accounting is the “language of business.” Leaders must develop fluency in financial concepts, principles and tools in order to understand and drive effective organizational decisions. In this course, you will learn to read, understand and analyze financial data as well as apply managerial accounting concepts such as costing, variance analysis, forecasting and capital budgeting. Maximize the impact of your financial decisions by learning to speak with numbers.

Emphasizing the investment strategies of Warren Buffett, this course will help you develop the financial management skills necessary to analyze the competitive strengths of companies, and from that analysis, gain a better understanding of the qualities that investors in those companies seek. You will leverage these financial management skills to become a more strategic and tactical manager and improve your communication abilities when dealing with senior financial professionals.

In this course, students learn how to define your organization’s capabilities to implement and execute a winning strategy. Using Jack Welch’s approach to developing and evaluating a strategy, you will create an effective plan of action designed to achieve the higher-level goals of an organization. You will learn to drive strategic outcomes by consistently assessing decisions. You will identify criteria for uncovering risk, and develop plans for proactively addressing risks inherent to strategy.

Everyone in the organization is responsible for operational excellence. This course focuses on the pursuit of operational excellence as a competitive strength. Students gain the tools needed to identify opportunities for improving process effectiveness and efficiency. Topics include value stream mapping, process analysis, quality, customer-focused design, Six Sigma and Lean systems.

As Jack states, “Every time you talk about changing, you have to put together the rationale for the change. You have to answer the question of what’s in it for the people who are forced to do something different than they are used to doing.” Business leaders need to stay ahead of the game and help people within their organization to understand that change is constant and effective change management is needed to win. Students will explore the role of Human Resources in executing successful change management initiatives within an organization.

Anyone can display an entrepreneurial streak, but not everyone can be an entrepreneur. In this course, you will learn what makes an entrepreneur tick and then walk through the stages of planning, financing and launching a new business. The course covers business plan development, market analysis, competitive positioning, business models, funding sources, company formation, intellectual property, sales, marketing and hiring. The insights gained will give you a powerful leg up in launching new businesses and new ventures within existing businesses.

This course is where it all comes together. Students will synthesize and apply all they have learned during their JWMI MBA program. They will complete a Capstone Project in which they will prepare and present a well-researched strategic plan to take their organization to a more profitable and sustainable position of market leadership. Because business leaders, especially CEOs, cannot just act on hunches, the first half of this course will be focused on business analytics. This will include an overview of powerful quantitative strategies and techniques used to analyze business data in any organization and improve decision outcomes across all business functions. Students will use these same techniques to identify, collect and analyze the data needed to support their strategic plan.