MSc Business Analytics

The MSc Business Analytics is a one-year specialist programme for graduates with a bachelor's degree with a substantial quantitative component, and highly qualified graduates from other backgrounds with demonstrable advanced quantitative skills. It will suit graduates or early career professionals who wish to pursue a career in business analytics across sectors such as digital marketing, human resources, logistics, retail, finance, banking, insurance and healthcare.

The MSc Business Analytics has been created in partnership with Industry professionals from IBM, LV & UCL/IBM Industry Exchange Network. It provides students with the opportunity to consult on real-life business analytics projects and to provide data-driven solutions to a real business problem or challenge, where possible, in partnership with IBM and other private, charity, and public sector organisations.

Students will gain a critical understanding of organisational, societal, and ethical issues in the use of Business Analytics. These issues are crucial for many organisations that seek to provide data-driven services while trying to balance innovation and competitiveness with public trust and corporate social responsibility. Examples of projects include optimisation of resource allocation, people analytics to support hiring decisions, customer segmentation and sentiment analysis to improve a business strategic direction.

At the end of the programme, students will have learned technical skills in data preparation (eg identification, extraction, and cleaning of data); the use of statistical and machine learning techniques to perform data mining and predictive analytics; the formulation and execution of statistical and mathematical models to optimise complex business decisions; social media and web analytics (eg web scraping, sentiment analysis, Natural Language Processing); the visualisation, interpretation, and reporting/communication of results from statistical analysis. Students will learn how to perform ad-hoc data analytics in Python and through specialised software such as IBM SPSS Modeler and IBM CPLEX.

You will be taught by leading academics whose research tackles the major issues in business analytics. 78% of the School of Management's research is rated as world leading or internationally excellent (REF 2014), reflecting its impact in shaping policy and practice. Bristol is a vibrant, ambitious and entrepreneurial city and home to SETSquared, the world's top university business incubator (UBI Global).