Business Management and Marketing with Placement Year

• You’ll graduate with a respected Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Diploma alongside your degree, adding prestige to your CV and putting you on the pathway to Chartered Manager status
• Because this degree is also accredited by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), you can gain exemptions from professional marketing qualifications too
• You’ll have the opportunity to be supported by a CMI mentor at every stage of your degree.
• We help you build skills in everything from market sensing to digital and social media marketing, together with strong management know-how  
• Work placement opportunities, live consultancy projects, topical case studies and business simulations give you plenty of hands-on experience
• Global perspectives enrich your learning: our students have broadened their horizons with study exchanges in Barcelona and fieldtrips to Copenhagen
• Take a placement year between years two and three of your degree.

Boost your employability with a placement year

You’ll have the opportunity to take a placement year to put the skills you’ve learned into practice in a real-world environment. We'll support you to find your placement and throughout your year in industry. Placements allow you to gain valuable experience to add to your CV, make industry contacts and help you to narrow down what kind of role you may be interested in after graduation. 

In-depth marketing knowledge paired with high-level management skills will give you a career advantage, wherever your ambitions lie. On this distinctive BA (Hons) Business Management and Marketing, you’ll develop the attributes, confidence and creativity to shape an organisation’s marketing strategy and help it take a customer-led approach to business opportunities.

You’ll learn how to combine all elements of the marketing mix, communicate brand values, harness digital marketing for an ‘always on’ 24/7 business environment, and adopt market sensing as an innovative approach to market research.

The BA (Hons) Business Management and Marketing is offered as a four-year degree to include a placement year. You can, however, study on a three-year full-time basis, with opportunities for internships in the summer breaks.

Accreditation

We have developed this course in close consultation with both the premier professional body for managers, the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), and the leading professional body for marketers worldwide, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Ours is one of the few degrees in the country where you can graduate with the CMI Level 5 Diploma in Management and Leadership alongside your degree. The Diploma is the benchmark qualification for full CMI membership and takes you a step towards Chartered Manager status, signalling to prospective employers that you’re suited to senior leadership roles and rapid promotion. You won’t need to take extra exams or coursework to achieve the Diploma: our combined module and CMI assessments offer a smooth route to both qualifications.

Throughout the degree, you’ll become an affiliate member of the CMI, at no extra cost, with access to networking events, online resources and additional benefits to support your career development and enhance your employability.

This programme is a CIM recognised degree meaning the marketing content of the course has been mapped against CIM’s unique professional marketing competencies. Graduates will be able to demonstrate a high standard of skills and behaviours required by today’s professional marketer. You can gain exemptions from the CIM Certificate in Professional Marketing for a head start in your career.

Professional mentoring

Thanks to the CMI accreditation, we can introduce you to a privileged network of contacts. You’ll have the opportunity to be supported by a CMI mentor at every stage of your degree.

Your mentor will be a senior business person – either a Chartered Manager or Fellow of the CMI with a wealth of experience and insights to share with you. From day one, they will advise and coach you from a business perspective, showing how the management and marketing principles you are learning can be applied directly to the workplace. 

Hands-on learning

You’ll take the theories off the page and put them into practice in real-world scenarios. You can test your ideas through business simulations, topical case studies and employer-led projects. A live consultancy project, where you help an employer to improve their business performance, will build your marketing, research, project management, problem-solving and decision-making skills.

We encourage and support you to take an optional placement year or summer internship. You could also benefit from fieldtrips to see business in close-up: one recent example was to the Sony UK Technology Centre, the company’s manufacturing and customer service base in Wales.

Expert teaching

You’ll be taught by an experienced and highly qualified team with an impressive track record for research and a national reputation for excellence. The team has extensive contacts in the business and professional community – including leading marketing practitioners and communication agencies – and you can draw on those connections for inspiration and insight too.

Global thinking

Your learning will be enriched by international perspectives. Ours is a global student community and the BA (Hons) Business Management and Marketing not only attracts students from all over the world to Derby but is also delivered for our educational partners across Europe and Asia. It means there is a lot of potential for inter-country debates, seminars and guest lectures delivered online, international case studies and joint projects.

In your second year, you’ll have the option to spend an exchange week in Barcelona studying at the EU Business School, one of our academic partners which runs the same degree and where teaching is in English. You could also take advantage of other optional visits overseas: a trip to Copenhagen saw our students investigating issues such as art fraud.  

Please note that our modules are subject to change - we review the content of our courses regularly, making changes where necessary to improve your experience and graduate prospects.

Our ‘scaffolded’ approach to learning provides a smooth transition so that you can ease your way into both university-level study and business management practice. It means that you’ll have full support in the early stages of the degree but will gradually move towards greater independence as your knowledge deepens and you start to immerse yourself in the wider business community. By stage three, you will be able to take more charge of your own learning, with module tutors advising and directing your studies.

Thanks to your contact with personal tutors, engagement with CMI mentors and participation in University events, you’ll become more attuned to professional behaviour and build your skills in critical thinking, creativity and self-reliance.

Another of our priorities is to foster a new generation of responsible business leaders with a strong moral compass. Throughout the course, you will therefore look at the role of business in wider society, exploring issues ranging from environmental sustainability to child labour, ethical governance to responsible innovation.

You’ll learn through different methods including:

• formal lectures, sometimes involving guest speakers
• tutor-led and student-led seminars
• one-to-one and small group tutorials
• work experience projects
• work-related learning
• self-directed study
• optional placement and internship opportunities
• video discussions with overseas partner institutions 

How you are assessed

Assessment is mainly via coursework which can take forms such as:

• traditional essays and reports
• group project work
• research and consultancy projects
• presentations
• posters
• design of digital materials
• in-class tests
• computer-based assessments 

Who you'll meet

You will be taught by an experienced and highly qualified team with outstanding contacts in the wider business community.

They include our Programme Leader Christine Harrop-Griffiths who plays a leading role in the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Regional Board and has made a major contribution to increasing CMI membership in the East Midlands.

Christine’s professional and research interests centre on ensuring that students benefit from a learning experience which is as practical and realistic as possible. In addition, Christine has drawn on her extensive connections to help ensure that every student on this course is matched with a professional business mentor in every year of their studies.

2025 entry

These are the typical qualification requirements for September 2025 entry.

Contextual offers may apply to students who meet certain criteria.

English language requirements

IELTS: 6.0 (with at least 5.5 in each skills area)

2025/26

Further information about our fees and support you may be entitled to.

Additional costs and optional extras

Your qualifications will equip you for a rewarding leadership career in any area of business and management, but particularly in the field of marketing.

They will also mark you out as having the potential for rapid promotion to senior positions, someone who can work competently and ethically in global and cross-cultural environments.

Our former students now work in a wide range of companies, including the BBC, Datapath, Capita and Centrica as well as local marketing and communications agencies and public sector organisations. Some have gone on to use the skills and entrepreneurial spirit they gained during their degree to set up their own businesses after graduating.

Further study

You can choose to continue your studies at Derby with one of our far-reaching masters programmes, including the MSc International Business and Marketing and the MSc Marketing Management. You may be entitled to an alumni discount on your fees if you decide to extend your time with us by progressing from undergraduate to postgraduate study.

Contact us

If you need any more information from us, eg on courses, accommodation, applying, car parking, fees or funding, please contact us and we will do everything we can to help you.

Additional information about your studies

Teaching hours

Like most universities, we operate extended teaching hours at the University of Derby, so contact time with your lecturers and tutors could be anytime between 9am and 9pm. Your timetable will usually be available on the website 24 hours after enrolment on to your course.

Course updates

The information provided on this page is correct at the time of publication but course content, costs and other individual course details do change from time to time and are updated as often as possible, so please do check these pages again when making your final decision to apply for a course. Any updated course details will also be confirmed to you at application, enrolment and in your offer letter.

If you are thinking about transferring onto this course (into the second year for example), you should contact the programme leader for the relevant course information as modules may vary from those shown on this page.

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