IB  Business.

If you don’t choose the right company for your HL Internal Assessment, then this could hamper you from the start. I give my students the following advice:-

• Select a company that is quite small, ideally between 20 and 75 employees.
• Choose one in which a family friend or family aquantance works, or one that has a conection with your family.  
• Do not choose the company  that your parents work for.
• The company should be in easy travelling distance from your home. 

Why this advice?

Smaller companies are much easier to navigate around, and to collect primary data from. Large companies, particularly multinationals, are notoriously bureaucratic, and it can be very time consuming getting permission to visit, or getting permission to talk to the right person in the right department. You will need to collect all your data during relatively few visits over a short short time span, three or four visits maximum. This is easier to do with a small, rather than a big company. Students can also get overwhelmed with the complexity, and the amount of secondary data that they are given by large companies.

With regard to the second bullet point, it is very hard to approach companies  ‘blind’  – you need to have a contact in the company to help facilitate your visit. You need a ‘foot in the door’ as it were.

Don’t choose the company that your parents work for. It can be quite hard to be objective about an organisation that your Dad founded, or your mum is the CEO of! Remember, the point of the IA is to critically evaluate the organisation. 

You may have to make multiple visits to your company so that it should not be too far away.