Business Foundations

Solve Real Business Problems

Build a foundation of core business skills in marketing, finance, accounting and operations.

About This Specialization

In this Specialization, you’ll develop basic literacy in the language of business, which you can use to transition to a new career, start or improve your own small business, or apply to business school to continue your education. In five courses, you’ll learn the fundamentals of marketing, accounting, operations, and finance. In the final Capstone Project, you’ll apply the skills learned by developing a go-to-market strategy to address a real business challenge.

Created by:

Industry Partners:

6 courses

Follow the suggested order or choose your own.

Projects

Designed to help you practice and apply the skills you learn.

Certificates

Highlight your new skills on your resume or LinkedIn.

Courses

Beginner Specialization.: No prior experience required.

COURSE 1
Introduction to Marketing
Upcoming session: Aug 7 — Sep 18.
Commitment
5 weeks of study, 4-6 hours/week
Subtitles
English, Ukrainian, Chinese (Simplified), Vietnamese, Turkish, Japanese
About the Course
Taught by three of Wharton's top faculty in the marketing department, consistently ranked as the #1 marketing department in the world, this course covers three core topics in customer loyalty: branding, customer centricity, and practical, go-to-market strategies. You’ll learn key principles in - Branding: brand equity is one of the key elements of keeping customers in a dynamic world in which new startups are emerging constantly. - Customer centricity: not synonymous with customer service, customer centricity starts with customer focus and need-gathering. - Go-to-market strategies: understand the drivers that influence customers and see how these are implemented prior to making an investment. Complete this course as part of Wharton's Business Foundations Specialization, and you'll have the opportunity to take the Capstone Project and prepare a strategic analysis and proposed solution to a real business challenge from Wharton-governed companies like Shazam and SnapDeal or to a challenge faced by your own company or organization. Wharton-trained staff will evaluate the top submissions, and leadership teams at Shazam and SnapDeal will review the highest scoring projects prepared for their companies.
COURSE 2
Introduction to Financial Accounting
Upcoming session: Aug 7 — Sep 11.
Commitment
4 weeks of study, 5-6 hours/week
Subtitles
English, Chinese (Simplified)
About the Course
Master the technical skills needed to analyze financial statements and disclosures for use in financial analysis, and learn how accounting standards and managerial incentives affect the financial reporting process. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to read the three most common financial statements: the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. Then you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization.
COURSE 3
Managing Social and Human Capital
Upcoming session: Jul 31 — Sep 4.
Commitment
2-3 hours per week
Subtitles
English
About the Course
People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-wining authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.
COURSE 4
Introduction to Corporate Finance
Upcoming session: Aug 14 — Sep 18.
Commitment
4 weeks of study, 4-7 hours/week
Subtitles
English
About the Course
This course provides a brief introduction to the fundamentals of finance, emphasizing their application to a wide variety of real-world situations spanning personal finance, corporate decision-making, and financial intermediation. Key concepts and applications include: time value of money, risk-return tradeoff, cost of capital, interest rates, retirement savings, mortgage financing, auto leasing, capital budgeting, asset valuation, discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, net present value, internal rate of return, hurdle rate, payback period.
COURSE 5
Introduction to Operations Management
Upcoming session: Aug 7 — Sep 11.
Commitment
4 weeks of study, 4-6 hours/week
Subtitles
English, Portuguese (Brazilian)
About the Course
Learn to analyze and improve business processes in services or in manufacturing by learning how to increase productivity and deliver higher quality standards. Key concepts include process analysis, bottlenecks, flows rates, and inventory levels, and more. After successfully completing this course, you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization.
COURSE 6
Wharton Business Foundations Capstone
Upcoming session: Sep 4 — Oct 16.
Commitment
5 weeks of study, 3-5 hours/week
Subtitles
English
About the Capstone Project
Wharton's Applied Knowledge Capstone Project enables you to apply your analytic skills to real business challenges – including your own. You’ll use your newly earned business skills to thoughtfully evaluate a real situation or opportunity from Wharton-governed companies like Shazam and SnapDeal.

Creators

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation across every major discipline of business education.
The University of Pennsylvania (commonly referred to as Penn) is a private university, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. A member of the Ivy League, Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and considers itself to be the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.

Michael R Roberts
William H. Lawrence Professor of Finance, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Christian Terwiesch
Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School, Senior Fellow Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics Co-Director, Mack Institute of Innovation Management
Brian J Bushee
The Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor
Peter Cappelli
Professor of Management, Director, Center for Human Resources
Peter Fader
Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
Barbara E. Kahn
Professor of Marketing and Director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center
David Bell
Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor, Professor of Marketing
Michael Useem
Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management