Business research papers can open up all sorts of new vistas for students, as well as garnering good grades. The investigation you do in preparation for a business research paper can uncover career options that you might not have considered, or help you rule out others. Naturally, your professor’s assignment will channel your direction substantially, but in almost any such exercise there is room to reflect your own curiosity. Most instructors are pleased when a student takes on a business research paper with genuine personal interests at heart. Let’s look at some approaches that might help make the task more exciting for you.
- Start with your own ambitions – What do you want to be when you grow up?
- Investigate employment prospects in that industry
- Identify market forces that could affect future employment
- Trace the development and history of your target job title – consider that almost every occupation has become professionalized over the decades/centuries
- Quantify the economic contribution of the job to which you aspire
- Exploit your personal background and experience for a research paper in business courses:
- Have you worked? Then you know something about business!
- Research papers on business can map the concepts you are currently learning onto your past experiences, e.g.,
- Micromanagement
- Death of the founding entrepreneur
- Overly rapid expansion
- Cash flow and cash management issues
- Control issues
- What is the news of the day? Find a shocking story – This should not be too difficult!
- Exploiting increased media focus on miscreant firms, and concomitant increased availability of information, follow one aspect of the story, other than the obvious one,
- In the NewsCorp instance, for example, what was Murdoch’s business strategy (apart from phone-tapping) and its impact?
- In the Enron case, plentiful research examines the scandal’s impact on governance, ethics, reporting, accounting, regulation, and what constitutes shareholder value (with institutional database access).
Find a really riveting article and chase it down, e.g.,
- The following in-depth study of employee ownership has been cited and built on by researchers globally. Each would allow for research on a region or a market sector in which you have an interest.
CITE, of course!