CIM Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing
CIM's Postgraduate Diploma is Stage 1 of its Chartered Postgraduate Diploma, and provides its knowledge and skills component.
The Chartered Postgraduate Diploma is a challenging marketing qualification that lets you demonstrate the specialist, professional competence you’ve gained through years of learning and experience.
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).
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 have substantial 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.
Open our information pack or read on for detailed course information.
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How the Postgraduate Diploma helps you
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
The Postgraduate Diploma has 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 achieve the Postgraduate Diploma.
CIM recommends 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 you study Emerging Themes before the final unit, Managing Corporate Reputation.
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.
You need to have
Stage 1, the Postgraduate Diploma, is similar in level to a masters degree, which means you will need to meet at least one of these criteria to study it:
- the CIM Diploma in Marketing,
- an appropriate business or marketing bachelors or masters degree (or an equivalent qualification) where a minimum of half of the credits come from marketing (i.e. 180 credits in bachelor degrees and 90 credits in masters degrees) from a provider that’s formally recognised by the appropriate official body and by CIM,
as well as:
- a range of experience working at senior marketing management level that has provided you with the ability to evidence that you can meet the learning outcomes of the CIM Diploma in Marketing if required to do so and is sufficient to pass the entry test to Level 7.
Note: qualifications over ten years old might not be considered.
If English is not your first language, you will also need to provide evidence of at least IELTS 6.5 proficiency or Trinity ISE III/IV.
What to expect
The Postgraduate Diploma typically takes between 10 to 16 months to study, though every student is different and some fall a long way outside this range. If you have a good idea of how much study time you’ll have each week on average, check the diagram for a closer estimate (a "session" is about an evening's work, i.e. two to three hours).
Assessment
Each unit has its own assessment; each assessment is different. The assessment at this level is complex, reflecting more closely high-level real world tasks:
- Emerging Themes – you survey the journalistic media for a sector of your choice and then write an article for it focusing on relevant, emerging, contemporary issues.
- Analysis and Decision – you receive a lengthy case study for analysis and later answer relevant, substantial questions in a conventional three hour exam.
- Marketing Leadership and Planning – this is a work-based project looking at a range of strategic organisational challenges in a workplace setting, and requiring you to demonstrate strong and relevant leadership in their resolution.
- Managing Corporate Reputation – this is a work-related assignment examining different aspects of corporate reputation in the context of your organisation or one you know well. Different answer formats will be set in each assessment: report, article, case study, white paper and so on.
There’s more on assessment on our CIM assessment page.
CIM fees
Our fees cover our course; you will have additional CIM fees. CIM charge a membership fee which you pay each year. This varies with where you are in the world. CIM also charges assessment fees. These can vary according to the type of assessment you are doing (exam style or assignment style). CIM will inform you of their fees; note that their fees tend to change each summer.
There’s a full CIM course information pack on our Downloads page and a direct link to our course fees below.
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Extra study
We run courses that, if you do your part, set you up for a safe pass. The Postgraduate Diploma is a masters level qualification: doing your part will involve some self-directed and inspired reading and research.
We will cover all of the explicit knowledge outcomes of the CIM syllabus, but the assessment CIM uses means that you will need to research your own organisation thoroughly and follow your own topic interests.
Your tutors will support you in this in the context of the individual units, but they will rely on your attitude and enthusiasm to give them the opportunities to help you.
We will also expect a lot of general background reading so you can keep up with developments in marketing and business. You can do that through newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, the Internet and the advice in your course materials, but for the highest marks you will need to include some books written bythe top thinkers and technical journals as well. At this level you must constantly show an awareness of the marketing aspects of relevant current affairs.
