Westminster Business School Blog Meet the Course Leaders – Rachel Lander, Purchasing & Supply Chain Management MSc

Meet the Course Leaders – Rachel Lander, Purchasing & Supply Chain Management MSc

July 31, 2014
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Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m Rachel Lander and I’m the Course Leader for the Master’s in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management at the University of Westminster. We’re a relatively new course, we started in 2010, but we’ve been growing steadily ever since. My background is in Operations and IT – information technology – aspects of supply chain and I work for the Westminster Business School’s Department of Business Information Management and Operations (BIMO) and we’re about the practical aspects of business, so our courses have this practical dimension. I’m the key contact for all the students on the course, but I also teach on the course, and my specialist areas are Green Logistics and business-process integration with SAP.

Can you please tell us a bit about your course?

Our course is well-regarded by the students who’ve graduated from it. We have successes with a variety of things. We’re accredited by the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) in the UK, which means that graduates of the course, having graduated, with three-years’ work experience, can apply for membership status for the chartered institute. We’ve also got a lot of stories about career successes, and for example, we’ve got people going into major roles in demand management in the cosmetics industry, we’ve got people in the European car industry, we’ve got people wider afield in Asia looking at manufacturing-type sector jobs and supply chain within those and we’ve got people in, say, the pharmaceutical industry in supply chain administration; and also obviously people going into the purchasing function, so we’ve had examples of people moving into purchasing of information technology and we’ve even had examples of people going into consultancy work from this Master’s.

http://youtu.be/_gtqqBKIDvI

What distinguishes this course from comparable postgraduate programmes?

The features that distinguish our courses here are the value-added package that we put together for students at the university. So for example, this year, our course has funded two field trips for students to go and observe business practice. We’ve also funded students applying and taking the PRINCE® Foundation Certificate, in addition to any study they do on project management here. We additionally also fund key course texts and also we fund the relaxing part of the courses – the course social events – such as course dinners and end of exam ‘get-togethers’.

What advice would you give to new postgraduate students?

My two top tips are to work hard and make friends on the course, because in order to succeed, you need a good support-network and that’s where friends really count.

What do you think is special about Westminster Business School?

What makes Westminster Business School different is that we have a real international community of students from all areas of the world here, which makes it a very vibrant place to study. These people are very keen to succeed so it builds up a discipline amongst the course of hard-work with rewards at the end.

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