Business
This A-level Business course introduces you to all you need to know about working in business, providing a solid foundation for further study. With a focus on helping you to become a good decision maker, you’ll learn essential managerial skills, alongside techniques to help you become an analytical problem solver. These skills are all highly sought after and valued in a wide range of careers.
Year 12 (first year)
An introduction to key business areas: marketing, operations, finance and human resource management. This includes a special focus on decision making – particularly how decisions made in one area can affect the rest of the business.
Content
- Topic 1 – What is business?
- Topic 2 – Managers, leadership and decision making
- Topic 3 – Decision making to improve marketing performance
- Topic 4 – Decision making to improve operational performance
- Topic 5 – Decision making to improve financial performance
- Topic 6 – Decision making to improve human resource performance
Year 13 (second year)
An investigation of the strategic decisions that all businesses have to make.
Content
- Topic 7 – Analysing the strategic position of a business
- Topic 8 – Choosing the strategic direction
- Topic 9 – Strategic methods: how to pursue strategies
- Topic 10 – Managing strategic change
Exam board
AQA
Future careers
If you’d like to study business, finance or management at university, A-level Business provides an excellent foundation. The skills you learn are also transferable across a broad range of subjects and careers. Whatever you choose to do in the future, you’ll find that the things you learn in this course will help. For example, you’ll probably work with lots of different people, so knowledge of motivational theory will help you to work well with others and help them achieve their potential. You might have ambitious plans to start your own business. If that’s the case, you’ll find the marketing and finance topics particularly useful.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/0/uks-highest-paying-degrees-according-graduate-salary/
Preparatory reading
Rather than any specific reading you should be taking an interest in business issues and current affairs. The BBC news website and the Guardian newspaper website are excellent sources of information. There are also two useful websites called tutor2u.net and https://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/magazines/magazines-extras/business-review-extras