Master of Science in Management

The Master of Science in Management (MSM) program provides recent college graduates with essential business knowledge and focused career development. Students join a collaborative cohort of individuals who represent a diverse set of undergraduate schools and majors. In particular, the MSM program is designed for recent college graduates with non-business degrees or majors. The goal is to provide students who have completed non-business degrees (everything from Art History, English, Engineering, Communication, Psychology, Economics, and more) with the skills and knowledge of business practices. Business minors as well as candidates who may have earned an undergraduate business degree some time ago are welcome to apply. The program is designed to complement students' undergraduate degrees in order to lead to jobs and careers that utilize their passions and skills.

The MSM is a cohort program, providing students with a one-year, full-time experience as graduate students working through a prescribed curriculum. Part-time schedules are also available. This is structured as an all online program designed to ensure that students acquire the 21st-century skills needed to work in fast-paced and often off-site business environments.

There are several signature elements of the MSM program. One element is our sharp focus on providing key career development opportunities and activities. We are one of the only programs to offer a personalized graduate level career development course in our curriculum schedule. Also a Program advisor works directly with students as well, providing industry insights and key advice on how to best position themselves for career and job opportunities. Another element is our plan to complete a one week Global Immersion Experience, in a designated non-US country, to build critical comprehension around sharp cultural differences and their impact on business practices. The capstone course for the MSM is one that focuses on entrepreneurship. This experience challenges students to become well-rounded leaders, with solid business perspective, as well as resourceful innovators who are globally aware and community-centric. The program emphasizes a conceptual understanding of business strategies, implementation of practical skills, such as forecasting sales and net revenues, forming a go-to-market strategy and conducting competitive market analysis as well as developing an ethical structure necessary for business or civic leadership.

These future leaders of the 21st Century explore and hone the analytical and critical thinking skills of a liberal arts education as they stoke their passions and animate their ideas, whether creating new non-profit or for-profit enterprises, or leading within existing organizations.

The overarching learning goals of the program are:

Goal I: To equip students with the critical thinking skills to discern on their own what needs to be done regardless of role in the organization. Leaders are not the people at the top, but are those persons who can influence and foster change.

Goal II: To prepare students to recognize who they are, what they value, and how to use their strengths in any situation.

Goal III: To provide a compass or way of proceeding that enables students to adapt to unknown situations because they know what they want to achieve.

Requirements 

ACCT 5400Introduction to Accounting3
DATA 5410Analytics Programming for Business1.5
ECON 5410Principles of Microeconomics1.5
ECON 5415Statistics for Business1.5
FNCE 5400Principles of Finance3
MGMT 5410Understanding Organizations1.5
MGMT 6500Leadership3
MGMT 6502Law and Ethics for Critical Reasoning in Business1.5
MGMT 6505Human Resource Strategy - An Artificial Intelligence & Human Intelligence Approach3
MGMT 6507Negotiations and Dispute Resolution3
MGMT 6515Professional Development0
MGMT 6530Entrepreneurship3
MGMT 6584Global Competitive Strategy3
MKTG 5410Marketing in the Digital World1.5
Total Credits30

Management

MGMT 5400  Organizational Behavior  3 Credits  
This course examines micro-level organizational behavior theories as applied to organizational settings. Topics include motivation, leadership, job design, interpersonal relations, group dynamics, communication processes, organizational politics, career development, and strategies for change at the individual and group levels. The course uses an experiential format to provide students with a simulated practical understanding of these processes in their respective organizations.
MGMT 5410  Understanding Organizations  1.5 Credits  
This course examines micro level organizational behavior theories as applied to organizational settings. Topics will include motivation, leadership, interpersonal relations, group dynamics, and strategies for organizational culture and change.
MGMT 6500  Leadership  3 Credits  
Prerequisite(s): MGMT 5400.  
Effective leadership provides a competitive advantage for an organization in the marketplace. The goal of this course is to enhance students' ability to successfully lead in an innovative, dynamic, global environment, building their confidence level to successfully lead in the 21st century. Building from a best practice "real-world" approach students will be given the opportunity to increase their knowledge and skill level through self-assessments, case studies, assignments, and experiential learning. An impactful set of strategies and techniques will be presented, covering situational leadership theories and practices, leading in multiple geographies and cultures, navigating team/organizational dynamics, influencing and motivating meaningful change, shaping culture, and creating vision and strategic direction.
MGMT 6502  Law and Ethics for Critical Reasoning in Business  1.5 Credits  
This course is designed to provide a solid basis in legal and ethical reasoning that can support effective decision-making about a wide range of complex business issues. Employing active learning methods, it efficiently provides students with the capacity to think independently in an informed, carefully reasoned way. Course content includes select legal topics, rules and concepts, models of legal reasoning and ethical analysis, and the relationship between the two.
MGMT 6503  Legal and Ethical Environment of Business  3 Credits  
This course helps students be more responsible and effective managers of the gray areas of business conduct that call for normative judgment and action. The course is designed to develop skills in logical reasoning, argument, and the incorporation of legal, social, and ethical considerations into decision-making. The course teaches the importance of legal and ethical business issues and enables students to make a difference in their organizations by engaging in reasoned consideration of the normative aspects of the firm. Using the case method, the course provides an overview of current topics, including the legal process, corporate governance, employee rights and responsibilities, intellectual property and technology, and the social responsibility of business to its various stakeholders.
MGMT 6504  Managing People for Competitive Advantage  3 Credits  
This course focuses on effectively managing people in organizations by emphasizing the critical links between strategy, leadership, organizational change, and human resource management. Topics include the strategic importance of people, leading organizational change, corporate social responsibility, implementing successful mergers and acquisitions, and fundamentals of human resource practices. Discussions interweave management theory with real-world practice. Class sessions are a combination of case discussions, experiential exercises, and lectures.
MGMT 6505  Human Resource Strategy - An Artificial Intelligence & Human Intelligence Approach  3 Credits  
Human Resource (HR) Strategy serves as the critical link between human resource management (HRM) and organizational success. Human capital, which is knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) of people, is the strategic asset of the firm that acts on all other assets to make them productive. In today's fast-evolving business landscape, leveraging both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Intelligence (HI) is essential for creating dynamic, HR strategies that enhance a firm’s competitive advantage. This course explores how HRM functions—including talent acquisition, training and development, performance management, compensation strategies, and employee relations—can be optimized using AI while maintaining the essential human judgment and ethical considerations necessary for effective people management.
MGMT 6506  Navigating Law, Ethics, and Investment in the Green Economy  3 Credits  
This course examines the intersection of sustainability, law, and finance to explore how policy, regulation, and private capital interact to shape the clean energy economy. With a focus on both U.S. and global frameworks, students will analyze the role of environmental law, administrative enforcement, and government incentives in supporting innovation and shaping market behavior. Students will explore how legal risk, ESG mandates, and regulatory complexity impact business strategy and investment decisions. Through readings, simulations, and real-world case studies - including venture financing of clean tech firms and ethical dilemmas in global supply chains - students will build practical fluency in how sustainability issues influence corporate governance, entrepreneurial ventures, and international dealmaking. Topics include environmental and administrative law, the Inflation Reduction Act, public-private partnerships, venture capital, ESG and CSR distinctions, international clean energy negotiations, and state-level green investment policies. Weekly instruction will incorporate current events and culminate in group-based legal and investment simulations.
MGMT 6507  Negotiations and Dispute Resolution  3 Credits  
Prerequisite(s): MGMT 6500.  
This course uses the theories of negotiation and alternative dispute resolution, along with extensive experiential exercises, to build individual negotiation skills and to help students manage disputes from a business perspective. The course emphasizes ways of managing both internal and external disputes.
MGMT 6508  Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation: The Entrepreneurial Firm  3 Credits  
This course begins by presenting cutting-edge concepts and applications so that students understand the dynamics of innovation, the construction of a well-crafted innovation strategy, and the development of well-designed processes for implementing the innovation strategy. It then focuses on the building of an entrepreneurial organization as a critical core competency in the innovation process. Concurrent with this, it focuses on the development and support of the internal entrepreneur or "intrapreneur" as part of the process of developing organizational core competencies that build competitive comparative advantages that, in turn, allow the firm to strategically and tactically compete in the global marketplace. Topics explored include technology brokering, lead users, disruptive technologies and the use of chaos and complexity theory in the strategic planning process.
MGMT 6515  Professional Development  0 Credits  
The purpose of this course is to aid the process of professional career development at the graduate level. Students will develop professional resumes, practice interviewing skills, and develop a robust LinkedIn social media presence for networking in the job market.
MGMT 6525  Employee Performance Management and Rewards for Competitive Advantage  3 Credits  
This course builds on the foundational evaluations and reward concepts covered in "Managing People for Competitive Advantage." Students explore in some depth the employee performance management, compensation, and reward systems in organizations. Topics may include 360 degree feedback programs, ESOPs, profit sharing, gain sharing, and the strategic use of employee benefits. The course focuses on how employee performance management, compensation, and reward systems can lead to a competitive advantage for firms.
MGMT 6530  Entrepreneurship  3 Credits  
This course covers entrepreneurship and small business management. The course focuses on the development of entrepreneurial start-up ventures from the point of view of the founding entrepreneur. The course explores characteristics and skills of successful entrepreneurs, the stages of growth of entrepreneurial businesses, the crises in start-up ventures, and issues confronting family and small business management. Students may create their own start-up business plan in conjunction with faculty as the primary course requirement.
MGMT 6531  Social Entrepreneurship  3 Credits  
This course is about understanding how entrepreneurial skills can be used to craft innovative responses to pressing social needs. These skills are opportunity recognition, assembling resources, launching a venture, scaling it and finally ensuring its sustainability. There will be an emphasis, throughout the course, on how exemplar for-profit enterprises have been able to successfully contribute to widespread economic well-being and social development while enjoying significant profitability. Students will appreciate that the pursuit of profit and poverty alleviation need not be mutually exclusive domains and the institutional requirements that are needed to ensure this outcome.
MGMT 6532  Strategies for Environmental and Social Sustainability  3 Credits  
This graduate level course provides an overview of topics related to environmental and social sustainability with a focus on how strategy and innovation at the business level help to create sustainable societies and infrastructures. This course has three major objectives: to increase students’ knowledge of key global sustainability related trends; to teach students to think strategically on environmental and social challenges; to help students understand the promises and limits of modern business approaches to sustainability. The course combines talks, case studies, and class discussions on management theory, tools, and frameworks shaping the business-environment interface, and evolving requirements for business success. Several guest lecturers will discuss how they have addressed sustainability within their company.
MGMT 6540  Cross Cultural Management and Sustainable Leadership  3 Credits  
This course develops a framework for distinguishing the various stages of cooperative relationships across national cultures, which have distinct characteristics and call for different modes of behavior. The stages of this framework include: identifying a cross-cultural win-win strategy; translating the strategy into viable action plans; executing the strategy and making cross-cultural collaboration happen; and assuring that emerging synergistic organizations become self-initiating entities. The course identifies and discusses in detail the necessary managerial skills for the support of each of these stages.
MGMT 6545  Law and Human Resources Management  3 Credits  
Prerequisite(s): MGMT 6503.  
This course examines law and public policy issues relating to employee rights and obligations, including employment discrimination, OSHA, pension and benefit issues, minimum wage, and workers' compensation. The course provides a basic overview of the law and its relevance to human resource strategy and operations.
MGMT 6555  Labor Relations  3 Credits  
Prerequisite(s): MGMT 6505.  
The dual aim of this course is to acquaint students with the dynamics of the labor-management relationship and to make them better negotiators and managers of workplace conflict. Toward these ends, this course examines the processes of bargaining and dispute resolution, primarily in the context of the unionized environment. Case studies, law cases, and experiential exercises are used to explore issues such as negotiations strategy, mediation, and arbitration. Successful models of cooperative relations between management and labor are also covered.
MGMT 6560  Career Planning and Development  3 Credits  
Prerequisite(s): MGMT 6500.  
This course provides students an opportunity to explore career planning and development issues from two perspectives, as a job-seeking candidate and as an employer engaged in the hiring and development process of employees. The course will provide theoretical background on a number of career development topics, including: career development over the life span, career transitions, work-family balance, and post-retirement issues. Cases on individuals negotiating career issues such as new roles associated with promotion, managing technical or entrepreneurial careers, aspects of derailment and family issues will be presented. The second part of the course will be devoted to experiential activities that are designed to enhance one's career planning skills. Students take a self-assessment survey and participate in workshops on resume creation, mock interviewing, and social media applications associated with the job search.
MGMT 6584  Global Competitive Strategy  3 Credits  
This course considers the formulation of effective policy and accompanying strategy actions, and the management of such policies and actions. It examines the role of the general manager in this process and presents the diversified issues and problems the management of a business firm may be required to consider and solve in strategic planning. This course also examines the problems and tasks of strategy implementation and the general manager's function of achieving expected objectives and establishing new ones to assure the continuity of the business organization. Students are required to prepare a business plan as part of this course.
MGMT 6900  Contemporary Topics  1-3 Credits  
This course examines recent practitioner and academic literature in various areas of management. Topics vary each semester. Guest speakers may be invited as appropriate.

A dual graduate business degree program allows students to pursue two graduate degrees, combining a Master of Business Administration (MBA) with a specialized Master of Science (MS) graduate degree in a specific field, or combining two specialized MS programs. The goal is to provide a broader skill set, enabling graduates to apply business knowledge in specialized industries or roles.

The advantage of dual degree programs is that they can be completed in less time than pursuing the degrees separately. These programs are ideal for individuals looking to expand their expertise across multiple disciplines, enhance career prospects, and increase their versatility in the job market.

Interested students will contact the Program Directors of each program to develop their dual degree plan of study.

The dual degree options include:

MBA/MS Dual Degree

Students will complete the seven core MS courses, five MBA subject area courses, and four MBA concentration courses. The MBA concentration will be in a different discipline than the MS program. The MBA concentration courses will count as MS electives. A minimum of 16 courses/48 credits is required.

Any prerequisite course for either the MBA or any of the MS programs will be required.

MS/MS Dual Degree

Students will take the seven core MS courses from the first program, the seven core courses from the second program, plus an elective. A minimum of 15 courses/45 credits is required.

Any prerequisite course for either MS program will be required.

 

The Dolan Career Development Center provides professional development services that enrich graduate students’ academic experiences and inspire tomorrow’s business leaders. For more information, reference the Career Development section of this catalog.

Fairfield University

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