Develop your ability to think strategically, analyze the competitive environment, and recommend firm positioning and value creation. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, top-ranked faculty will help you explore the underlying theory and frameworks that provide the foundations of a successful business strategy and provide the tools you need to understand that strategy: SWOT, Competitor, Environmental, Five Forces, and Capabilities Analyses, as well as Strategy Maps.

The Musician's Professional Toolbox is more than just a collection of career-building skills: professional musicians need strategies in place that maximize the impact of those skills. Designed for musicians at any point in their career, this course will provide learners with foundational skills necessary for managing your professional music career, including skill assessment, time management, goal setting and networking. The course can be taken by itself or as the first course in the Musician's Professional Toolbox.

Understanding who your customers are and what they need and want is at the heart of successful marketing strategies. In this course you will explore how to identify and classify customers and the different methods that marketing professionals use to shed light on how they make purchase decisions. The course will cover the following: 1. Marketing Fundamentals 2. Product, Pricing and Channel Decisions 3. Building Strong Brands 4. Communication Strategy

If you’ve heard the terms stakeholder capitalism, or sustainability, or ESG, corporate social responsibility, CSR, conscious capitalism, sustainable development goals, shared value, corporate citizenship, or purpose-driven company but don’t know exactly what they mean—or don’t know how to make these ideas come to life—then this course is for you. Every business model and every operating decision has stakeholder trade-offs embedded in it. Profits to the bottom line are not always compatible with the interests of the stakeholders that surround the corporation. Based on Professor Sarah Kaplan’s award-winning course at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and her book "The 360º Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation," this course is designed to help you analyze these trade-offs (Mode 1) and learn how to address them either by rethinking them (Mode 2), innovating around them (Mode 3), or thriving within them (Mode 4). The 360° Corporation is an organization that can productively and effectively manage trade-offs. By taking this course, you will be joining a community of executives around the world who are looking to transform their organizations to meet the needs of the 21st century. The COVID-19 pandemic has gotten us all to rethink our careers and focus on how to make our work as meaningful and rewarding as possible. This course will aid you on that journey by helping you connect social responsibility to your own decisions. And, it will help you reexamine the role of business in society. This is not just a course for people with “social responsibility” in their job title. While it will be useful for anyone whose role is to spread sustainability, gender and racial equity, social responsibility and other stakeholder strategies throughout their organizations, the course is equally important for every executive and line manager because everything you do matters for the social and environmental impact of your products, services and organizations. We’ll also discuss the impact on corporate governance and the roles of corporate directors and institutional investors in leading change. This course offers signposts to leaders who want to spearhead the 360° Revolution. With detailed case studies, useful frameworks and handy action steps, the course will show you that companies can develop explicit and coherent plans for addressing the tensions created by stakeholder trade-offs and pursue corporate purpose. Enroll today to become a 360º Leader! [This course was developed with support from the University of Toronto and from the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management.]

This capstone project course for the Recommender Systems Specialization brings together everything you've learned about recommender systems algorithms and evaluation into a comprehensive recommender analysis and design project. You will be given a case study to complete where you have to select and justify the design of a recommender system through analysis of recommender goals and algorithm performance. Learners in the honors track will focus on experimental evaluation of the algorithms against medium sized datasets. The standard track will include a mix of provided results and spreadsheet exploration. Both groups will produce a capstone report documenting the analysis, the selected solution, and the justification for that solution.

This course focuses on the theory and practice of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), with a focus on the Finance. The Finance of M&A uses tools from different areas of Finance to help managers and investment bankers design successful M&A deals. In particular, we will learn to value and price M&A deals and how to choose the optimal financing mix for an M&A deal. The course focuses on all the major types of M&A deals including strategic M&A, private equity leveraged buyouts (LBOs), and restructuring deals such spinoffs and asset transfers. The course will benefit any student who desires to increase their ability to understand and execute M&A deals, including (but not limited to), entrepreneurs, consultants, bankers, investors, analysts, corporate managers, marketers, strategists, and deal-makers of all types. The course will also deepen students’ understanding of financial modeling and capital structure, both in theory and practice.

This course focuses on applications of optimization methods in portfolio construction and risk management. The first module discusses portfolio construction via Mean-Variance Analysis and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) in an arbitrage-free setting. Next, it demonstrates the application of the security market line and sharpe optimal portfolio in the exercises. The second module involves the difficulties in implementing Mean-Variance techniques in a real-world setting and the potential methods to deal with it. We will introduce Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as risk measurements, and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which play an important role in trading and asset management. Typical statistical biases, pitfalls, and their underlying reasons are also discussed, in order to achieve better results when completing  real statistical estimation. The final module looks directly at real-world transaction costs modeling. It includes the basic market micro-structures including order book, bid-ask spread, measurement of liquidity, and their effects on transaction costs. Then we enrich Mean-Variance portfolio strategies by considering transaction costs.

In this course, you will gain an introduction to the basic terminology and concepts in the field, along with an overview of the development cycle from identification and cultivation through stewardship and recognition. You will learn how to develop a case for support, identify and assess prospective donors, match a donor’s interests and needs with your organization’s mission and goals, recognize planned giving benefits to your donors, structure a successful solicitation, and respond to ethical dilemmas. You’ll also examine career opportunities in the field, along with contemporary issues and trends confronting today’s fundraising managers. Throughout the course you’ll gain hands-on practice developing an array of written products for your fundraising and development portfolio.

In this project, you will create your very own resume and cover letter from start to finish. You will utilize the Google Docs application in a Google Chrome web browser to find readily available templates. We will first review the basic parts of a resume and fill in your own personal information related to contact information, personal summary, work experience, education, and any additional information. We will also review what it takes to create a great cover letter and fill it in with your own words. As we create these documents you will get to learn many ways to customize text format, styles, bulleted lists, and even add a signature to your cover letter. Lastly, we will cover how to print the document and save it to a file such as a PDF so these documents can be shared to your next potential new employer. Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

In this guided project, you will learn how to use Facebook Marketplace to buy and sell items on the platform, list items for sale through creating a new listing and selecting different available options, ship your own orders after creating your lists of products, and understanding the payment methods. By the end of this project, you will have learned how to use Facebook Marketplace, buy and sell products on Facebook, and build your own marketing portfolio.