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Entrepreneurial Practice
3,500 words
Entrepreneurial Practice – Critical Analysis, Business Venture Proposal and Reflective Practice
This assessment for the Entrepreneurial Practice module requires students to critically analyse a real organisational issue using one of three specified employer case study videos and develop a proposal for a new business venture. The assessment is an individual 3,500-word equivalent portfolio consisting of three tasks: a 1,500-word report, a 1,000-word briefing note, a narrated two-slide PowerPoint presentation, and a 500-word reflective personal and professional account. Students must select only one of the three case studies provided: Paragon, Reliance Housing, or Ovo Biomanufacturing. The chosen case study must be used consistently across the relevant tasks. Task 1 requires a short report based on the selected employer case study. Students must critically and strategically analyse the challenges and issues facing the organisation using one or more appropriate strategic analysis tools. The report must also critically evaluate the organisation's leadership model or models and communication strategies, including their impact on employee and organisational culture and performance. Finally, students must provide three justified recommendations designed to enable and improve organisational performance. This section is 1,500 words and represents 30% of the assessment. Task 2A requires a 1,000-word briefing note based on the same case study. It involves a critical appraisal of the phases of entrepreneurial practice from the idea stage through to delivery, including the benefits and potential funding sources for the proposed new business venture. Students must also critically analyse strategies for addressing and managing risks within the proposed venture and critically appraise the entrepreneurial traits, characteristics, skills and competences required for strategically positioning the new venture within the organisation. Task 2B requires a two-slide narrated PowerPoint presentation lasting three minutes. The presentation should pitch the proposed business idea to an audience of employees, managers, senior managers and the Board of Directors within the case study organisation. It should explain what informed the new business idea, its benefits to the organisation, potential funding prospects, risks and risk-management strategies, and the entrepreneurial traits, characteristics, skills and competences required for strategic positioning. Task 3 is a 500-word reflective personal and professional account. Students must select a professional area from the CMI Code of Conduct and Practice and reflect on how it can be applied to their current or future professional career. The brief allows the use of reflective models such as Gibbs, Kolb, Rolfe or Burton, or another appropriate professional and systematic reflective model. The assessment develops skills in communication, creative thinking, integrity, adaptability and completing tasks, with particular emphasis on leadership and entrepreneurial skills. The learning outcomes include evaluating ethical and inclusive approaches to leadership, diversity and entrepreneurship; reflecting critically on entrepreneurial practice and effective leadership; understanding principles for leading and developing people; understanding leadership and development strategy; and understanding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial practice in strategic contexts. The submission requires Task 1, the Task 2A briefing note and Task 3 to be combined into one MS Word document, while Task 2B must be submitted separately as a narrated PowerPoint with audio. The written work should include a cover sheet, page numbers, Arial 12-point font and 1.5 line spacing. References and appendices are excluded from the word count, while words in tables count towards the final word count. The assessment also carries a 10% allocation for referencing and structured presentation across the three tasks. The assignment brief places particular importance on using the selected case study as the foundation for the analysis. Wider research may be used, but the primary focus should remain on the case study interview, CMI materials, module-related models and content. Students are expected to apply relevant models, tools and methods discussed in seminars and CMI learning journeys and support their analysis with appropriate evidence and academic literature.
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Business Management / Strategy
2,467 words
Contemporary Issues in Business (BS729) — Reflective Portfolio: Case Trends, Stakeholder Perspectives and Management Frameworks
This Level 7 portfolio accumulates across a semester of case-based workshops and is submitted as a single document combining reflective writing with sustained critical discussion. The assessment rewards demonstrable personal development as much as analytical knowledge, so the writing is first-person where it needs to be and evidential throughout. The reflective component presents six workshop reflections, each no longer than 150 words and each structured through one of the established reflective models introduced in the module — Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, Kolb's Learning Cycle, Schön's framework or the ERA framework. These are not summaries of what the case was about. Each one identifies where the analysis could have been sharper, what was missed in the live discussion and why, what will be repeated and what will be done differently, with the emphasis falling on transferable learning about how business problems are diagnosed and decisions taken under uncertainty rather than on the particulars of any single case. The larger critical component works through three connected questions. The first examines how contemporary trends studied in the module affect businesses both positively and negatively, drawing on two specific cases but deliberately reaching beyond them to consider consequences across whole industries — the trend, not the company, is the unit of analysis. The second addresses why identifying stakeholders and understanding their perspectives is critical to sound decision-making, using one module case to demonstrate it. Competing interests are mapped explicitly, the power and legitimacy of each group considered, and stakeholder theory used to argue why a manager who weighs only shareholder interest arrives at a worse decision. The third question turns to the management tools and frameworks applied during the module, using two cases to show how a particular tool was selected, what it revealed that unstructured analysis would have missed, and equally where it fell short. This includes judgement about when each framework is and is not appropriate, since selecting the right tool for the problem is itself the skill being assessed. Harvard referencing is applied consistently across all sections, with academic sources supporting the theoretical claims and practitioner sources grounding the industry discussion. Portfolio items are collected through PebblePad across the semester and consolidated into one file for submission, the class participation element being tracked separately by the lecturer across the case discussion sessions.
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Engineering and Professional Practice
3,000 words
Internship Reflective Report and Poster Presentation — Professional Practice in an Industry Placement
An internship module assessment asks students to convert a period of workplace experience into evidenced academic reflection. It is not a report on what the host organisation does; it is an account of what changed in the student's own understanding of their discipline as a result of working outside the taught programme. The written component typically runs to around three thousand words and is built in weighted sections. An opening section covers how the placement was secured — the reasoning behind the choice, the search and application process, and what that process itself taught the student. The bulk of the marks then sit on the reflection proper: what the student actually did, how existing disciplinary knowledge held up when applied in an unfamiliar setting, and where gaps appeared. A final section addresses personal and professional development, supported by specific examples rather than general claims of having "grown in confidence." The second component is a short poster presentation summarising the placement and its learning, delivered live. Posters are assessed on professional presentation, clarity, correct referencing and balance — students commonly over-fill them with text that a viewer cannot read at presentation distance. Formatting requirements on this type of assessment are unusually prescriptive and carry marks: a cover page with name, student ID, tutor name and declared word count; a table of contents; page numbers; captions on every figure and table; specified font, size and line spacing; numbered headings; and a strict file-naming convention. Marks are lost here for no reason other than inattention. Note also that in-text citations and quotations usually count toward the word limit even when tables and references do not, and markers may simply stop reading once the limit is exceeded by more than the allowed margin. The defining challenge of reflective assessment at this level is criticality. Rubrics consistently distinguish description from evaluation: recounting tasks performed scores at the lower bands, while analysing why something was difficult, what it revealed about a gap in preparation, and what will be done differently scores at the top. Reflective frameworks give this structure, but they must organise genuine experience rather than substitute for it. This assessment is inherently personal — the content derives entirely from the student's own placement. Our support is therefore confined to guidance: explaining what distinguishes descriptive from critical reflection with worked examples, showing how a reflective framework structures a section, advising on poster layout and information density, checking formatting and referencing against the specification, and reviewing a student's own completed draft against the published rubric.
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Professional Development & Employability
2,100 words
Professional Development & Planning Portfolio — SWOT, Career Plan, UK CV & Interview Reflection
A Professional Development and Planning portfolio is a Level 7 employability assessment that asks postgraduate students to evidence their own professional growth rather than analyse an external case. It typically integrates three connected components into a single submission: a critical self-analysis with a forward-looking career plan, a set of job-application documents, and a reflective account of a practical employability exercise such as a recorded mock interview. The first component combines a SWOT analysis with a structured career development plan. Students are expected to move beyond listing traits, and instead show how each strength, weakness, opportunity and threat actually shapes their short- and long-term trajectory. Established reflective frameworks — Gibbs, Kolb, or comparable employability models — are commonly used to give the self-analysis theoretical grounding. The plan that follows usually requires a career vision, two or three SMART goals derived directly from the SWOT, an action plan with resources and timelines, and a strategy for reviewing the plan over time. Marks are lost most often where the components sit side by side without integration: a SWOT that never feeds the goals, or goals that are specific in form but generic in substance. The second component is a UK-format CV and a targeted cover letter for a real advertised role. UK conventions matter here — no photograph, no date of birth, no full address — alongside a concise personal statement, achievement-focused bullet points rather than duty lists, and visible evidence of research into the employer's values and strategic direction. The cover letter is expected to argue for candidacy rather than restate the CV, and is normally capped at one page. The third component is a reflection on a recorded practice interview, written against the platform's own scored feedback on speech rate, filler words, self-positioning and answer structure. Because this reflection must respond to individual results, it is inherently personal and cannot be written generically. Our support on this type of assessment is structured around guidance rather than production. Typical areas of help include: explaining what distinguishes a descriptive SWOT from an analytical one, showing how SMART goals should trace back to identified development needs, reviewing CV and cover letter formatting against UK employer expectations, clarifying how reflective models are applied at postgraduate level, and checking a completed draft against the assessment's own marking criteria before submission.
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