Business Studies
Exam board: AQA
A-level Business – the key to your career
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.
Further study and career opportunities If you’d like to study business, finance or management at university, A-level Business provides an excellent foundation.
The skills you learn are 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.
A-level Business content 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
• 3.1 – What is business?
• 3.2 – Managers, leadership and decision making
• 3.3 – Decision making to improve marketing performance
• 3.4 – Decision making to improve operational performance
• 3.5 – Decision making to improve financial performance
• 3. 6 – Decision making to improve human resource performance
Assessment : Internal
Paper 1: written exam: 1 hour 30 minutes. 80 marks in total
Paper 2: written exam: 1 hour 30 minutes. 80 marks in total
A-level Business content Year 13 (second year)
An investigation of the strategic decisions that all businesses have to make.
Content
• 3.7 – Analysing the strategic position of a business
• 3.8 – Choosing the strategic direction
• 3.9 – Strategic methods: how to pursue strategies
• 3.10 – Managing strategic change
A-level assessment
A-level assessment consists of three x 2 hour written exams taken at the end of the two year course.
Each exam will be worth a third of the A-level.
- Paper 1: Business 1
- Paper 2: Business 2
- Paper 3: Business 3
All three papers will draw on material from the whole course, and will feature a range of question styles including multiple choice questions, short answer questions, essay questions, data response questions and case studies.
Find out more: aqa.org.uk/why-business