Master of Science in Management (iMSM)

Program Overview

The MS in Management curriculum provides students with a relevant set of business management skills designed to open new career pathways. Delivered by Gies’ expert faculty with decades of industry experience, the iMSM helps students grow as professionals and get the kind of know-how that’s been shown by research to resonate with employers. The iMSM is designed to be a versatile degree. A student will gain confidence and use this degree to develop the capabilities to advance ideas and make a bigger difference in the workplace.

The curriculum is divided between core business and management courses and also electives. The core coursework includes leadership and teams, marketing management, strategic management and process management, as well as foundational classes in accounting and finance. Students will then have the opportunity to customize their degree by taking elective courses focused on business value and project management, global business challenges, or business data management and communication. Learning takes place in several modalities: online self-paced lecture content, high-engagement live classes, and practical mastery through hands-on projects as well as in everyday job responsibilities at work.

When you graduate, you'll be able to:

High-engagement Live Courses

Learn more about the iMSM high-engagement courses on the Gies website. You can explore the Core and Elective courses and discover how Gies can build your business and management knowledge.

Try a course before you apply

Courses

Ready to sample a course from the iMSM program? The following Specializations are open for anyone to enroll in. If you are admitted to the full program, your coursework counts towards your degree learning.

Managerial Accounting

Introduces management accounting as part of a firm's information system, with a focus on modern cost accounting and budgetary systems for planning and controlling business operations

Managerial Accounting: Cost Behaviors, Systems, and Analysis

Managerial Accounting: Tools for Facilitating and Guiding Business Decisions

Leadership and Teams

Develops and integrates fundamental behavioral concepts and theory that have administrative applications. An initial focus on individual decision makers expands to ultimately include interpersonal, organizational, and social structures and influences, and is oriented toward developing strategies and methods of research as they pertain to behavioral applications in business.

Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader

Leading Teams: Building Effective Team Cultures

Marketing Management

Introduces concepts useful for understanding marketing systems and buyer behavior, and supports the development of skills for making marketing decisions. The orientation is primarily managerial and uses examples from both business and non-business contexts.

Developing a Winning Marketing Strategy

Developing a Marketing Mix for Growth

Strategic Management

Addresses policy construction and planning of policy implementation at the executive level, and features case studies of company-wide situations from a management point of view. An additional focus is on the integration and application of material from previous courses.

Business Strategy

Corporate Strategy

Introduction to Finance

Provides an introduction to finance for students who have little or no background in the discipline, and details how managers and investors use key finance principles to make investment and financing decisions.

Introduction to Finance: The Basics

Introduction to Finance: The Role of Financial Markets

Process Management

Offers an introduction to decision-making problems in production, with a focus on the theoretical foundations for production management and the applications of decision-making techniques to production problems in a firm. Production processes, plant layout, maintenance, scheduling, quality control, and production control in particular are all covered.

Operations and Supply Chain Decisions and Metrics

Process Improvement

Graduate Certificates

These graduate certificates stack directly into the online Master of Science in Management (iMSM). Each of the high engagement courses that comprise these certificates carry University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate credit.

Graduate Certificate in Strategic Leadership and Management : Become a confident all-around leader and learn in-demand skills for managing people and teams and developing and implementing organizational strategy.

Learn more about this certificate

Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing: Build the skills to uplevel your marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

Learn more about this certificate

Graduate Certificate in Value Chain Management : Learn to recognize what different customers value, measure inputs and outputs to assess value, and generate higher value for customers and greater surplus for organizations.

Learn more about this certificate