Description
By engaging fully with this assessment, you will practice making well-reasoned
arguments and sound judgements based on a range of academic and industry
references. You will also practice and develop your analytical and written
communication skills, which are sorely needed to excel in any career.
Assessment Question:
Context: You are an intern at a real company of your choice.
Task: Produce a report that helps the company understand the impact of current
developments in the external environment on its activities. To develop the report,
you are required to select TWO factors in the macro-environment (as contained in
the 6-factor PESTEL framework) that have had the most influence on your chosen
company in the Covid19 pandemic. Your report should discuss positive and/or
negative implications of relevant issues (i.e., trends, developments or events
resulting from the Covid19 Pandemic) under the TWO PESTEL factors you have
selected on the company. Your report should conclude by making recommendations
on how the company can deal with TWO key challenges, which according to your
earlier analysis, your chosen company is confronted by.
Further Guidance
The macro-environment, with a focus on the factors that make up the PESTEL
framework will be introduced in Week 11. Subsequent lectures will introduce you to
some examples of specific issues (i.e. trends and developments) that you could
discuss under some of the PESTEL elements, such as digital trends, sustainability
concerns, and technological advancements. In addition to these, your report will
greatly benefit from your personal reading of relevant material, especially regarding
Covid19 related issues. Thus, please also refer to the textbooks for this Module
(Worthington et al. 2018 – The Business Environment: a Global Environment;
Palmer and Hartley, 2012 – the Business Environment, and Ferrel, Hirt and Ferrel,
2020 – Business Foundations) and online articles, such as the Havard Business
Review, Forbes, the Financial Times, on topics relevant for your report.
Checklist –
To do well on this report:
1. Ensure that you follow the guidelines for writing a report. Further guidance on
this will be provided in seminars and on Moodle.
2. Clearly identify a specific issue(s) linked to the PESTEL factors you focus on. It is
not enough to just mention, for example, that the technological environment has
changed. You need to provide specific example(s) of issues in this environment (e.g.
rise in the adoption and use of social media) that is relevant for your chosen
organisation.
3. Ensure that you have referenced correctly, following the University of Kent’s
Havard Referencing Guide.
4. Indicate in your report resources you have read. For instance, if you have read
from the BBC that Covid19 had led to high rates of inflation in Country A where your
company is located, you could indicate this in your report in the following way –According to the BBC (2022), Country A has faced significant increases in prices.
This could lead to…
The resources you reference can include company websites, quality newspapers and
news sites, textbooks, journal articles from Google Scholar, etc. Third party and
essay producing websites are not reliable sources of information and you are
strongly discouraged from using information from here in your reports.
5. Without such references in your text, the highest grade for your Reading &
Knowledge mark will be a 2.2.
