CIM Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing
CIM's Chartered Postgraduate Diploma is a challenging marketing qualification that lets you demonstrate the specialist, professional competence you’ve gained through years of experience.
The Postgraduate Diploma is the Chartered Postgraduate Diploma's Stage 1, providing its knowledge and skills component.
The Postgraduate Diploma leads on to the Stage 2 Charter Diploma. When you have passed Stage 1 you will be able to, with appropriate additional work experience, upgrade your membership of CIM to Full Member status (MCIM).
NQF 7 is the level at which you would find a Masters degree, for example. It also encompasses NVQ Level 5. Note that 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.
The Postgraduate Diploma is intended for people who are ready to focus on the strategic aspects of marketing management at the highest levels. You will be older, with “real world” experience as a middle or senior manager working in marketing as, for example, a marketing manager, business development manager, strategic marketing or brand manager. You will have significant marketing qualifications and be ready for:
- strategic/senior management roles,
- director roles,
- roles that report to and influence board decisions,
- cross-functional roles that have a business impact.
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How the Postgraduate Diploma helps
The Postgraduate Diploma is designed to enable you to make the transition into strategic management, working more cross-functionally and at a more senior management level, where you will be expected to make a significant contribution towards the organisation’s corporate and business strategy, contribute to board decisions, and demonstrate a high level of leadership and influence. This is expressed, for example, in:
- strategic responsibility for marketing decisions,
- creating broad organisational impact,
- developing vision and long-term direction,
- guiding corporate decisions,
- managing growth, transition and transformation,
- competitive positioning,
- leading and influencing,
- cultural design,
- managing headcount and human capital,
- internal networking,
- coaching/mentoring – being the catalyst for unlocking human potential,
- managing corporate resources effectively,
- business strategy development,
- budget planning,
- strategic IMC.
Study programme
Stage 1 of the Chartered Postgraduate Diploma aims to provide the knowledge, skills and knowhow for senior marketing managers, giving them an insight into defining the organisation’s strategic focus, and developing marketing strategies and the corporate communications plan.
There are four units; a unit is a self-contained course of study which has its own syllabus and which leads to an assessment. You must pass all four to earn the Postgraduate Diploma.
CIM recommend that the units are studied in the order shown here. This is often not practical for students studying over a longer time period, as many students do, so we recommend to start with Analysis and Decision, and to make sure that Emerging Themes has been studied before the final unit, Managing Corporate Reputation.
Transition (2004 syllabus to the 2009 syllabus)
We describe CIM's new syllabus on this website. If you are part way through the old, 2004 version of the (Chartered) Postgraduate Diploma, call us to discuss what would be best for you to do.
Emerging Themes (Course 381)
This unit enables you to critically evaluate the impact of a range of new and emerging themes on marketing, business organisations and the changing marketing environment. It also helps you build and refine the skills necessary to anticipate and adapt to future changes.
You are expected to take a strategic perspective of the impact of these themes at a sectoral or industry level, as well as upon the organisation you work for, or another one you know well.
CIM will highlight the most influential developments in which they view the themes to be at work. These developments will be reviewed and revised from year to year. Potential developments of interest include: political devolution, network governance, credit crunch, changing demographics, migration, health and obesity, emerging technologies and their impact on business, social networking, 3D printing, climate change, societal/social and green marketing, digital marketing, customer power, ethical consumption, collaboration and competition between organisations, business sustainability and the triple bottom line, intelligence gathering, creative and flexible thinking.
Analysis and Decision (Course 382)
This unit comprises: strategic audit; strategic options; making strategic marketing decisions. Its overall purpose is to prepare you to formulate and implement context-appropriate strategy. To achieve this, you will learn to:
- undertake a sophisticated strategic audit that helps prioritise the key issues, opportunities and risks facing an organisation in meeting its future objectives (performing a clear and detailed assessment of an organisation and its performance, and the issues and challenges it faces in creating and delivering best value).
- use your strategic audit to generate strategic options and critically evaluate those options in respect of the key issues faced by the organisation.
- recommend an option based on, and justified by, a critical evaluation of its suitability in the specific situation.
This necessitates mastering the skills of analysis and argument, including: qualitative and quantitative analysis; justifying decisions; providing reasoned arguments for recommendations; applying financial and risk models to support assessments; demonstrating an understanding of how decisions will support the achievement of the organisation’s vision, mission and strategic business and marketing objectives.
Marketing Leadership and Planning (Course 383)
This unit enables you to develop effective high-level strategic marketing strategies relating to an organisation’s corporate and business strategic intent in the short, medium and long terms. You should be able to:
- analyse the corporate strategy,
- determine a range of high-level marketing and relationship strategies, and
- demonstrate how these strategies will deliver an organisation’s desire for growth and expansion, its changing stance on CSR, ethics and key strategic decisions.
The focus is on developing and delivering strategic marketing plans to support the delivery of an entire organisation’s value proposition. To achieve effective, innovative and creative plans, you must recognise the need for sophisticated change management programmes, designed to enable an organisation to be increasingly flexible and responsive in meeting the changing requirements of the marketplace, balanced against the requirements of corporate strategy. You must consider the reasons for change and the types of change management plans that should be put in place.
This unit provides a detailed understanding of the major issues in developing a relevant, agile and flexible market-oriented organisation, which can respond to a dynamic and changeable market environment. This includes a detailed understanding of the issues concerning the degree of influential leadership required to execute such change within an organisation, both from the top down and from the bottom up. It requires a thorough understanding of the resources required to implement change within an organisation and to establish the level of competence and capability required to deliver an organisation’s value proposition to its key stakeholders and markets.
Managing Corporate Reputation (Course 384)
The strength and character of a place, entity or organisation’s reputation represents the way in which a complex range of stakeholders perceive it. This is not necessarily the way it intends to be seen. This gap can be due to a range of forces, some slow, foreseeable and manageable, and some sudden, unforeseen and relatively unmanageable. All can result in underperformance, destabilisation, financial difficulties, leadership change, a fall in market valuation, and even difficulty in raising finance or recruiting the right personnel.
This unit explores ways in which organisations (and others) can minimise the gap and avoid these potentially serious issues. It focuses on learning to manage in the following ways:
- critically evaluate the way organisations develop their identities, and some use these to form images and assign reputational status,
- critically analyse the elements that contribute to the identity that an organisation projects to its stakeholders, sometimes through a corporate brand,
- critically evaluate linkage between how an organisation wants to be seen and how it is seen, namely corporate communications.
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.
