The Henley pre-study course suite
Prepare for your Masters and get a taste of studying at Henley Business School.
Exclusively available to Henley Business School offer holders, the pre-study course suite comprises of innovative short courses designed and developed by Henley faculty on the Futurelearn platform, one of the leading online learning platforms.
These courses will provide building blocks of knowledge to help you prepare for your learning journey in the area of your choice as well as equip you with key employability and study skills for successfully navigating your studies and professional career.
The courses are delivered online by Henley faculty and you will receive online support by one of our teaching staff members and be able to interact with other prospective students in your course.
If your application to study for a Masters at Henley is successful, following your offer you will receive an invitation to access the courses relevant to your programme of choice. You will then be able to complete the courses online and at your own pace. After completing each course you will receive a certificate of completion from Henley Business School.
You will have the opportunity to complete the pre-study courses relevant to your programme of choice, prior to commencing your studies. These courses are offered free of charge and are designed to prepare you for postgraduate study. There is no obligation to accept your offer for a Masters course at Henley in order to complete the pre-study courses.
Study skills for success
This pre-study interactive course is designed by Henley Business School faculty, the University of Reading Study Advice Team and the International Study and Language Institute. The course aims to prepare you for your learning journey at Henley and focuses on helping you build important study skills to succeed in your Masters and beyond. Skills such as curiosity and independent thinking, effective communication and collaboration, digital capabilities, storytelling, empathy and professional integrity are not only important in your course itself but are also sought after by employers in all areas of business. Therefore, they are instrumental in succeeding in your professional career. The learning journey of our Masters programmes is designed in a way that allows you to build such skills and this course intends to demonstrate exactly how, and therefore help you to make the most of your Masters. This course is designed to complete at your own pace and will take approximately 10 hours.
Building blocks of finance
This pre-study interactive course is designed by ICMA Centre faculty to prepare you for your learning journey at Henley if you are undertaking postgraduate study in any finance-oriented subject. Through the course, you will appreciate the purpose of finance and investment, the main types of investment and financial markets, as well as the process of valuing investments and the role of risk and return in investment performance. These are all important fundamentals in understanding the workings of financial markets and being able to apply them to real and practical problems as part of your course. We encourage you to take the course even if you have studied finance before. The course is delivered online, requires around 15 hours of study and can be completed at your own pace.
Future of work: coding with Python for business & finance
This pre-study interactive course is designed by Henley Business School faculty to introduce you to the world of coding in Python. According to recent employer surveys, coding is a top 5 employability skill in the new world of work. The World Economic forum includes technology design and programming in the top 10 skills of 2025. Coding is an extremely powerful skill to have going forward in all areas of business and finance. Due to the importance of coding skills in your future, you will be using coding in some of your courses depending on your choice of programme at Henley Business School. So, this pre-study course can be seen as a stepping stone in your learning journey and takes only 15 hours of study time to complete. Even if coding is not directly utilised as a part of your programme, completing this course, earning the certificate and complementing this with some further independent learning, could set you apart in an increasingly competitive job market. Python is the most utilised programming language in the world and so the purpose of this course is for you to learn the fundamentals of Python, and how to use it to solve practical problems in your area of interest.
Building blocks of maths and stats for finance
Mathematics are among the building blocks of financial economics as they are used to express, reason and prove many of its underlying principles. While being good at finance doesn’t necessarily require you to be good at math, gaining an understanding of basic math is important in grasping and applying the principles of finance and investment theory. Equally, quantitative techniques or statistics are among the main tools finance and investment professionals utilise in analysing data linked to financial markets and securities. This interactive pre-study course is designed to deliver these essential building blocks in maths and quants and prepare you for a Finance Master’s if you don’t have a finance, maths, or quants background. For those with a relevant background, it can serve as a refresher of this essential knowledge. The course will cover maths and linear algebra foundations such as operations, functions, variables, matrices and optimisation, all of which are important in understanding key financial principles. It will encompass statistical foundations such as returns, distributions samples, linear regression models and statistical inferences. The emphasis is on understanding how these foundations are applied to finance and investment. If you have never taken a quants or maths course before, completing this pre-study course, and passing the final multiple-choice-based test (with a score of at least 50%) might be a requirement for entry to your course, in which case this would be clearly stated in your offer letter. This pre-study course will be made available to Henley offer holders in March 2023 and will take 15 hours to complete at your own pace.
Our students
The Python pre-course is fantastic. It helped me to study the Econometrics module in my MSc course well, as I had not had any coding experience in my accounting degree before. I loved the wonderful study experience and the contents were also very attractive.
It was nice to know that despite many of us having varying backgrounds, we all shared some basic knowledge through completing the pre-study course. I think it’s easy to arrive and think ‘everyone here definitely knows a lot more than me! What am I going to do?’, but doing the course beforehand definitely helped appease those thoughts.
