The Course

Principal Learning (learning you have to do)
This covers all you need to know about Business, Administration and Finance at the level you’re studying. You’ll learn about the issues that are affecting businesses today, how they work and what skills you need to work in them. Like communication and interpersonal skills, citizenship, team working, admin, research and analysis, and giving presentations.

Additional and specialist learning (options you can choose)
You can take specialist courses about Business, Administration and Finance as part of your Diploma. You could, for example, learn more about ICT if you’re into business systems or HR if you’re more interested in people. Maybe even a subject that you can use to set up your own business in the future. You can pick subjects that you might want to study at university, like law, science, politics or a language. Or a course to do with a hobby: a creative subject, say music, dance or art.

Functional Skills (curriculum subjects)
You’ll still do English, maths and ICT as part of your Diploma course. You’ll need them to get your Diploma qualification, and for whatever you go on to do next.

Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills
These are skills like team-working, creative thinking and self-management. You’ll need them for life, study and work, and they’ll help you to be a success whatever you do in the future.

Work Experience
On your Diploma course you’ll get to do at least 10 days’ work experience. It’s a great way to use the skills you’ve learnt in the classroom, and see what work is really like. It might be with a small local firm, seeing how it’s organised and how one person does a variety of roles like finance, human resources and marketing. Or you could spend time with a larger organisation, looking at how the finance department or customer services teams do their jobs.

Student Project
You can do your project about anything you like because you choose the topic, and how you’re going to present your work. You’ll need to show all the things you’ve learnt on your Diploma course, but what you do it on is up to you. It could be a written piece of work, like a report; an investigation or something practical, for example setting up some market research with shoppers in a local retail outlet to find out about buying trends.