Many of you already realise how Business Studies may fit into your future career plans: you may want to pursue a career in finance, accounting or banking, or you may be interested in Pharmacy or Optometry and realise that you will be working in a business environment with cost centres, financial reporting and human resource issues.  Whichever route best fits your interests, AS Business Studies will help you understand the pressures of setting up and running successful enterprises.

At AS level, you will be trained to anticipate and solve business problems.  Your AQA exam board uses case studies of firms as stimulus material and your job will be to identify and justify the best courses of action for the firm, given the information provided.  You role will be more like that of the Dragons in Dragon’s Den and more like Alan Sugar’s in The Apprentice, than that of the contestants.

In order to be successful at AS you will need to read and understand business data and be able to learn and apply new terminology.  Much of the data we use is numerical so you will need a calculator with you at all times.  Your English comprehension skills will continue to be stretched as you use a wide variety of real business information.

At AS we are introduced to the decision facing individuals who are in the process of setting up their businesses.  As we progress through the course, the businesses become bigger, more complex, and often more successful.  The specification requires you to have detailed knowledge of firms that you have researched yourself.

Business Studies is an excellent option for students who are actively interested in the world around them.  We are lucky in that shopping and watching adverts both contribute to our knowledge of the subject.  You will need to be prepared to talk about the research that you do outside lesson time and we will help you to formulate arguments based on business theory and your own experience.

Past students have found that Business Studies complements other subjects such as Mathematics, Psychology, Design and Technology, Economics and IT.

For more information try AQA’s Student Guide: http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-2130-W-SG.PDF