A great way to enhance your CV / UCAS application

Well done to Melissa Gunstone (Year 13 Business Studies) who took the initiative and organised herself a voluntary work placement with the Dame Hnnah Rogers Trust at Seale Hayne. Melissa hadn't studied the subject at GCSE, but since taking it at A level has decided it's what she wants to study at university. Working one afternoon a week, Melissa has been able to experience what it's like in the real world of business and make excellent use of some of the marketing & finance knowledge she has gained from her studies. Here is her Blog Post:

By Melissa Gunstone (Year 13)

Since the Summer of 2011, I have been working voluntarily at the Dame Hannah Rogers Trust at Seale Hayne. Here I have been able to conduct first-hand market research for future business ventures such as their Christmas and Wedding hospitality packages and the new 'Cake House' retail outlet. These have brought  challenges regarding setting budgets, assessing the competition and meeting tight deadlines. My involvement has enabled me to attend business meetings where I have been asked to contribute ideas of my own, thereby improving my presentational skills and self-confidence. One meeting involved discussing design ideas for cake packaging and the wedding and Christmas brochures and coming to decisions on which designs would best reflect the business and capture customers' interest through effective use of the Trust's unique selling point (USP); it's beautiful location. I was also involved in the organisation of a bridal fair, which again brought many challenges. It's fair to say the greatest challenge was effective communication between departments within the organisation as well as with the media regarding promotion of the event. Overall, the fair was a great success and I gained valuable experience in organising a high-profile, corporate event.

Student Blogpost

By Sam Dennis (Year 13)

Student2Student Teaching Episode: Investment Appraisal

The objective of our lesson was to teach our fellow students how to calculate and use average rate of return as a method of investment appraisal. We aimed also to show some advantages and disadvantages of using average rate of return and how you would answer an exam question on it.

In our lesson we decided to include a lot of different tasks that involved around average rate of return. We decided to do this as we thought that it would keep the class involved and then they would not get bored. We put in a short exam question to work on in pairs just to show what they could expect if it came up in an exam. We also included a beat the teacher game and a quiz at the end to make sure the students had been listening and to see what they remembered. We also issued a hand out at the end so that they could have some revision notes for when the exam comes up.

Looking back at the feedback from who we taught, some of the positives were:

·         We put in a lot of tasks for them to do so it kept them involved and listening.

·         As we ran through an example with them it showed how easy it was to understand. This means they can look back at the example if they get stuck.

However we also got some “Even Better If” feedback which suggested that if we were going to do this lesson again then we should have included some pictures or graphs in  our presentation so that it was a bit more visual and more interesting to look at.

Click below to view our presentation:

Mission Statements

Years 9 &10: You should now have a good idea of what a mission statement is. It's intended to summarise an organisation's goals and philosophy. Click on the video link to see some mission statements for organisations which you might recognise. Why not have a go at trying to write a mission statement for yourself? Think about your own personal goals and try and summarise what YOU are all about in simple statement ...

Franchises

(OCR Business - Unit 1)
As a follow up to the work we have been doing on Franchises, here are the Cafe2U videos showing how the business operates and an interview with UK Managing Director Tom Acland:

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the blog for the Business Studies department at Newton Abbot College.

We are hoping that this will become a useful forum to share ideas, resources and assessment tips for all things Business & Economics related.

Check back soon to see what's been posted ...