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.
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.
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. 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. This course is designed to complete at your own pace and will take approximately 10 hours.
Building blocks of finance
Future of work: coding with Python for business & finance
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 going forward in all business and finance areas. This pre-study course is a stepping stone in your learning journey and takes only 15 hours of study time to complete. Python is the most utilised programming language in the world, 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
While being good at finance doesn’t necessarily require you to be good at maths, gaining an understanding of basic maths is important in grasping and applying the principles of finance and investment theory. 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. 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 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.
The Building Blocks of Finance pre-study course was both very interesting and informative. It provided a good foundation for my postgraduate programme. I enjoyed the practice-based approach of teaching and the interactive nature of the course.
The pre-course has been essential to breaking into the coding landscape. The combination of practical exercises and statistics theory helped me to develop a basic but comprehensive understanding of Python. Coding skills are tremendously sought-after in the job market and this course allows you to kick-start your learning!
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.
