The ICSA Diploma in Business Practice
The Diploma builds upon the Certificate, increasing your knowledge of the business world and showing you how to work successfully at a higher level. When you have completed the Diploma, you will be able to use the designatory letters "Dip. ICSA (business practice)" after your name. You will also be able to start studying ICSA’s Professional Programme, which leads to full ICSA membership as a Chartered Secretary. The Diploma is roughly the same level as the second year of a degree programme and is made up of four modules, as follows.
Business Law in Practice (Course 311)
Business Law in Practice surveys a broad range of the legal principles important to business organisations (including employment, consumer protection, liability, intellectual property, health and safety, and contract legislation). It shows how to communicate legal information in commonplace situations, examines the regulations acting on organisations, looks at the organisation’s relationships with its stakeholders (including directors, shareholders, employees, customers) from a legal point of view, and introduces ideas on managing risk.
Marketing (Course 312)
Marketing provides a full introduction to the varied group of activities for which the marketing department is responsible. Marketing’s responsibilities within the organisation are explained, as well as how marketing affects and furthers the organisation’s relationship with the world around it. Topics covered include market structures, marketing planning, market research, understanding and applying the marketing mix, marketing communications, and understanding customers.
Business Finance (Course 313)
Business Finance considers the routine financial decisions which need to be made by every organisation. From a foundation of thoroughly understanding the organisation’s accounting statements, it develops a number of tools for analysing the organisation’s finances (marginal costing, cost-volume-profit analysis, accounting ratios, economy, efficiency and effectiveness, financial gearing, cost of capital, working capital ratios, and standard costing). It uses these to understand a variety of decision-making situations, such as financial planning and control, budgets, capital investment, financing the organisation, and pricing decisions. Business Finance also looks at the organisation’s need for accounting information in terms of the reports it needs to make, principally to its owners.
Business Strategy and Planning (Course 314)
Business Strategy and Planning looks at how an organisation decides upon its aims and the methods it uses to achieve them. This starts with the guiding aim of the organisation, its "mission", and moves through a series of steps of understanding the organisation and what it is capable of, to its environment and what it may be able to achieve in it, to choosing a goal and planning the changes and policies necessary to reaching it, and finally to measuring progress towards the goal and reviewing whether the goal should change. This process uses a number of established tools (for instance SWOT and PESTLE), and is influenced by a variety of approaches, which the course examines.
Programme details
You are required to have passed the ICSA Certificate (or an equivalent qualification) before starting the Diploma; it is likely to take between ten and fourteen months to study. You may study the modules one at a time, all together, or in any combination, whatever suits you best. Each module has its own three-hour exam. Part of the question paper will be on a real life business situation (a "case study") which you will be told about before the exam so that you can prepare for it.
Click for details of the ICSA Certificate.
Study plus
The ICSA Diploma is a professional qualification, so we provide more support for your study. You will be able to participate in the student discussion group used by our CIM, CIPS, and IoE students, and will also receive our Learning Skills and START-ITALICS)Study Skills guides for extra help and advice.
