The CIM Professional Post-Graduate Diploma in Marketing
The Professional Post-graduate Diploma is a post-graduate level qualification intended for people who are probably working as a senior manager in marketing with many years’ experience. At this level you will already have gained a significant level of knowledge and/or experience of marketing and are ready to focus on the strategic aspects of marketing management.
Once you’ve completed the Post-graduate Diploma you are eligible to become a Full Member of CIM (MCIM) after a period in practice and can start towards becoming a Chartered Marketer, and/or studying for a masters degree in a marketing discipline.
Study programme
The Post-graduate Diploma rounds out your management skills and provides the broader marketing background you need as a marketing professional and senior manager. It provides a strategic management and decision-making framework that encompasses the entire profitmaking process from new product development through to after-sales care.
There are four modules; you have to do all of them. Analysis and Evaluation should be the first module that you study. Strategic Marketing in Practice must be the last, it builds on all of your other studies.
Analysis and Evaluation (Course 244)
Analysis and Evaluation covers the concepts, techniques and models involved in developing a detailed understanding of the market, customers and competitive environment, both externally and internally, including the organisation, its capabilities and assets, the opportunities available to it and its current performance.
Strategic Marketing Decisions (Course 245)
Strategic Marketing Decisions covers the concepts, techniques and models involved in formulating a customer-focused competitive business or corporate strategy and developing a specific and differentiated competitive position. It includes the investment decisions affecting marketing assets.
Managing Marketing Performance (Course 246)
Managing Marketing Performance covers the implementation stage of the strategy. This encompasses managing marketing teams, managing change, implementing strategy through marketing activities and working with other departments, and using measurement as the basis for improvement.
Strategic Marketing in Practice (Course 247)
Strategic Marketing in Practice provides the opportunity to explore strategic marketing in a practical setting. You learn to demonstrate that you can understand complex marketing problems with strategic implications and to use your studies to devise creative and realistic solutions that work both in the short and long term. It is taught and examined through case studies and places emphasis on understanding and applying all CIM study up to this point, on strategic thinking ability, coherence of argument, absorption of detail, and clear justification of solutions.
Programme details
To start studying at the Post-graduate Diploma level, you will need to either have:
- CIM’s Diploma or Advanced Certificate in Marketing,
- an undergraduate (or postgraduate) degree with significant marketing content from a CIM-approved university,
- NVQ or SVQ Level 4 in Marketing from a CIM-approved institution (UK),
- NVQ or SVQ Level 5 in any other subject from a CIM-approved institution (UK),
- another appropriate qualification approved by CIM, or
- six years' marketing management work experience, three of which should be at a senior level.
Even more so than at the Diploma, you will be assumed to be comfortable with everything that has been taught at the lower levels of the CIM scheme.
You can enrol for as many or as few modules at the same time as you like.
The Post-graduate Diploma typically takes between 12 to 18 months. As it is a post-graduate qualification, CIM will expect you to do a lot of background reading. Your study can start with newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and the Internet, but for the highest marks will need to continue through books written by the top thinkers and technical journals as well. At this level you must constantly demonstrate an awareness of the marketing aspects of relevant current affairs.
You’ll need to sit a three-hour exam in each module, though with Strategic Marketing in Practice you will get a case study brief some weeks before the exam which you will need to analyse in some depth as part of your exam submission. There’s more on exams on our assessment page.
After the Post-graduate Diploma
From the CIM Post-graduate Diploma you can go on to study a great variety of higher-level programmes.
The University of Leicester offers an MSc in Marketing and an MBA with a significant marketing content, and both can be studied by distance learning. If you would like more information about these, contact the Management Centre at the University on +44 (0) 116 252 5520 or visit their website at http://www.le.ac.uk.
You can also work towards becoming a Chartered Marketer. CIM is committed to continuous professional development and Chartered Marketer status reflects this. For further information please call CIM on +44 (0)1628 427351 or email charteredmarketer@cim.co.uk.
