What You Can Do with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business

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Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business studies is a popular undergraduate program for many students.

It provides you with a thorough grounding knowledge in most aspects of the world of business, including marketing and finance, allowing you to specialize in a particular area further down the line if you so wish.

However, with the world of business being so vast, you might not be quite decided on which career path you want to go down once graduation day rolls around.

To help you out and give you some ideas, here are some careers you can pursue with a bachelor’s degree in business.

Retail management

A career in retail management is a great choice if you already have extensive experience working on the shop floor.

This on-the-ground experience will inform your managerial practices and provide you with the first-hand knowledge needed to implement real changes for the better.

As a retail manager, you will oversee operations both on the shop floor and behind the scenes to ensure that the retailer is running profitably and providing great customer service. You might be involved in anything from resolving a customer query to managing stock rotation and balancing the inventory on any given day.

It is a varied role requiring great interpersonal skills, along with organization and attention to detail. Many retailers offer grad schemes that you can apply for, to fully prepare you for a managerial position in their company. 

Data analyst

If you love working with numbers and are detail oriented and organized, then you could find that you thrive with a data analyst career path. Every business collects large amounts of data, whether that is through sales figures and profit and loss sheets, social media analytics, or customer surveys.

This data can then be thoroughly mined for insights that can be used to inform and improve the company’s processes to ultimately bring about larger profits. As a data analyst, you will have the expertise needed to interpret and analyze this data and use it to provide insights and suggestions for improvement.

Your role might include translating data into plain English, providing data reports to management, identifying trends and patterns in data sets, and designing, creating, and maintaining databases and data systems.

Sales representative

Being a sales representative is all about building relationships, so it is a great role if you are a people person.

Although the goal might be to build your commission and make sales, most customers do not like a hard sell, which can all too often come across as aggressive and makes the customer feel that they are being forced into buying the product.

Instead, you should approach your sales pitch as you would any other social interaction and look to build relationships with your customers through small talk, warmth, and honesty.

This way, you will make more sales while increasing customer loyalty, ensuring that they receive excellent customer service and want to continue to return to your business where they will be looked after.

Marketing

During your business studies undergraduate program, you might have found yourself drawn to a particular element of business, such as marketing. The marketing department of any business focuses on building brands and getting the business and its products out there to build a loyal customer base. A career in marketing is a fun and varied one, allowing you to flex your creative muscles while satisfying a need for organization and order.

Your role might focus on a particular part of marketing, such as building your online presence and creating high-quality content for successful social media marketing or, instead, developing a print advertisement strategy should your business favour more traditional strategies. Other roles might include creating, developing, and monitoring various ad campaigns and analyzing customer data for insights.

As marketing involves a particular set of skills and expertise, you might decide to hone these skills by taking a further education program in marketing, as well as building your industry experience through freelancing work. One final bonus of pursuing a career in marketing is the reliable (and sometimes lucrative!) wage that your skills may be worth.

For instance, in the UK, the average digital marketing salary is £31,882 a year and this figure has the potential to rise as you further develop your skills, gain valuable experience, and create a stellar reputation for yourself in the industry. 

Accountant

A bachelor’s degree in business will provide you with a great grounding of the business world for you to go ahead and pursue accounting qualifications.

As an accountant, you will be involved in tasks such as compiling and presenting financial and budget reports to management and preparing accounts and tax returns. Becoming an accountant is a highly flexible career path, as you could potentially work with a huge range of individuals and organizations.

For example, you could join work as an accountant in the finance department of a large company or become a certified public accountant after having taken and passed your CPA exam and become licensed.

Or, you could even work on a freelance basis offering your accounting services to small businesses and individuals wanting to take control of their personal finances.

Entrepreneur

Simply put, an entrepreneur is someone who works for themselves running their own business. You might have taken your bachelor’s degree in business, dreaming of becoming the next Elon Musk; however, to be a successful entrepreneur requires a great amount of hard work and dedication – not to mention a large dose of luck.

If you have a business idea that you are passionate about and are committed to making work, you might consider finding a business mentor who has succeeded in becoming a successful entrepreneur. Your mentor will be able to pass on their tips and wisdom and be able to guide you through the process of setting up your own business, as well as providing you with much-needed moral support during tough times.

Running your own business can easily take over your entire life, so it is essential that you are passionate about your business while also remembering to build in some time for self-care to ward off burnout.

Conclusion

These are just some of the opportunities that are available to you with a bachelor’s degree in business. All make for fulfilling career paths.

However, as has been demonstrated, you will benefit greatly from pursuing further education, such as a master’s degree or certification program, so that you can further specialize in your chosen sector and progress in your career.