Professional Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing / Chartered Postgraduate in Marketing course
This is a challenging level of learning designed to enable marketers to exert a strong influence on their organisation's willingness and ability to adopt a customer orientation as part of a competitive strategy, as well as managing the organisation's marketing activities.
Who are they for?
These qualifications are aimed at marketers who have already developed a significant level of knowledge and/or experience of marketing. You will already be working at a strategic level, or aspiring to do so, and eager to further strengthen your ability to develop successful customer-focused strategies.
Professional Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing
As well as acting as Stage 1 of the Masters level qualification, this can also be considered as a valuable qualification in its own right. Studying for this will not only equip you with a comprehensive knowledge of marketing at a strategic level, but it also has the added benefit of allowing fast-track entry onto a selection of UK marketing-related MA, MSc and MBA courses.
The typical profiles of people who might take the Postgraduate qualification include:
- Middle/senior managers working in marketing, eg marketing managers,
- Business development managers, strategic marketing or brand managers.
- Marketers who hold the Professional Diploma qualification.
- Business/marketing graduates with significant experience of managing marketing resources.
The four units in the course are:
Emerging Themes is a unit that will encourage you to consider how businesses need to respond to emerging themes from a marketing perspective. It will give you an insight into the latest issues that are impacting upon marketing in both today's and tomorrow's dynamic and changeable business environment.
Analysis and Decision prepares you to undertake a strategic audit of your organisation in order to assess its ability to deliver its business and marketing strategy, and to make strategic choices and decisions based on that audit within the context of a dynamic global market place. The unit focuses on the tools for strategic decision making of this type, including financial and risk analysis for each decision.
Marketing Leadership and Planning develops the skills needed to evaluate options, make strategic decisions and develop strategic plans. It also develops an understanding of the organisation's need for change and how best to manage change through clear and strong leadership.
Managing Corporate Reputation looks at marketing communications, but specifically its strategic role in managing the organisation's reputation, brand and positioning. The unit looks at the nature and characteristics of reputational management and examines closely the methods of developing effective corporate communications.
Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing
This is Stage 2 of the two-part Masters level qualification; achieving this Stage ('Leading Marketing') will earn you the Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing. This stage is entirely project based and we tailor our delivery to individual candidates. Please contact us if you already hold the CIM Professional Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing and wish to take the Stage 2 qualification to achieve Chartered status.
Entry requirements
The CIM's entry requirements for the Postgraduate course are that you meet these criteria:
- You should hold the CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing (previously known as CIM Advanced Certificate in Marketing), or
- You should hold a business or marketing Bachelors or Masters degree (or an equivalent qualification) where a minimum of half of the credits come from marketing (ie 180 credits in Bachelor degrees and 90 credits in Masters degrees)
AND
- You should have a range of experience working at senior marketing management level that has provided you with ability to evidence you can meet the learning outcomes of the course.
The entry requirements for the Chartered course are:
- You should hold the CIM Professional Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing.
AND
- You should have a range of experience working at senior marketing management level that has provided you with ability to evidence competence in managing marketing resources and contributing to business decisions from a marketing perspective.
AND
- You should ideally be in a position to plan, agree and implement a work-based project relevant to your business context.
Course schedule
As this is a qualification that by its very nature is taken up by smaller numbers of people than the other CIM qualifications, we run each course based on demand. Therefore, we invite you to register an interest in attending the Postgraduate course and we will give you an indication of our next course schedule. The location will depend very much on the people who enrol, but we anticipate holding a series of intensive one- or two-day tutorial sessions at a central East Anglia location to enable people from across the region to attend. Please contact us if you wish to register an interest or for more information.
Fees
Our fees for this course are currently under review - please contact us if you would like to be notified when the fees are announced.
There are two areas of additional cost:
1. Affiliate Membership (Studying) of the CIM (if you are not already a CIM member): £200 inclusive, payable to the CIM.
This gives you access to a range of CIM services, including:
- 'Knowledge Hub' of online resources.
- 'Learning Zone' including past exam papers, examiner reports and model answers.
- 'The Marketer' - the CIM's monthly members' magazine.
- Discount entrance to seminars and workshops organised by various CIM local branches around the country.
2. Assessment fees of approx £360 per course, payable to the CIM.
NOTES:
- Payment by instalments is available to students who are paying for their own studies (ie if their employer isn't paying).
- We can also accept you on any individual units that you wish to take, for example if you have already taken some units elsewhere and now need to complete your studies.
Please contact us for information about this course.
"I finished my CIM studies in July 2009 and since then I have worked on two major marketing projects, where I have been able to apply some of the skills I learnt with Marketing Ability. This has involved developing a new consumer facing brand for our business and also introducing a new online channel to market.
The work I did with Bob and his team was very beneficial to these projects and has resulted in me recently being promoted onto the senior management team."
Stuart Costello
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Friday 6 January 2012 14:24

