What Do You Learn in Business Administration?

Business administration is defined as the process of organizing a company’s personnel and resources to meet different goals and objectives. This activity includes managing an enterprise’s human resources, finances, marketing and operations.

Why study business administration? Academically, business administration can help students prepare to pursue careers in business management in the areas like the ones we just mentioned and beyond. For students who are interested in a broad-based business education, business administration degrees are a good choice compared with technical or more narrowly focused degrees, such as accounting, finance or human resources. Business administration education can be attained by completing a degree program at the associate, bachelor’s or master’s levels, and enriched with internship opportunities and on-the-job experience.

Students enrolling in DeVry’s Bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration, Management or Technical Management can choose from 11 degree specializations that concentrate your learning pathway in areas like accounting, analytics, finance, sales and marketing and others.

What will you learn? As a business administration major, you will be exposed to coursework that will help you learn what organizations need to thrive.

No business administration program would be complete without coursework in accounting. Accounting is the process by which all businesses record their financial transactions and report those transactions to oversight agencies and other groups, such as investors. These financial statements provide a concise summary of a business’s operations, financial position and cash flows, and provide the basis for decision making and cost planning. 

Accounting coursework in DeVry’s Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration program includes fundamentals of accounting, financial accounting and managerial accounting. Students who choose our Bachelor’s Degree Specialization in Accounting are exposed to a much more accounting-intensive curriculum.

Finance and accounting go hand in hand, but where accounting is the gathering, reporting and analysis of an organization’s financial activities, finance is the big-picture view of how the organization plans to manage and use money to meet financial goals. This could involve the use of credit and debt, securities and investment to finance projects that are current priorities using projected income. The finance field can be broken down into 3 main areas: corporate finance, personal finance and public finance. 

If you plan to pursue a career that is focused more on finance than accounting, you can choose an academic program that will cover business administration skills and concepts but with a strong emphasis on finance. Students enrolled in our Bachelor’s Degree Specialization in Finance are exposed to a finance-intensive curriculum that includes statement analysis, business analytics and fixed income securities analysis.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for consumers, clients, partners and society at large. This definition clearly indicates how vital marketing is to the success of businesses, regardless of what they produce and sell, and who they sell it to.

With coursework in advertising and public relations, salesmanship, international marketing, marketing analytics, creativity, innovation and new product development and more, DeVry’s Bachelor’s Degree Specialization in Sales and Marketing may be a good fit for business students who want to focus on preparing to pursue career opportunities related to the art and science of marketing. If you’ve already earned a bachelor’s degree and wish to advance your education further, you may want to explore the MBA with a Specialization in Marketing offered by our Keller Graduate School of Management.

The social science focusing on the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services is called economics. This discipline also analyzes the choices individuals (microeconomics) and governments and nations (macroeconomics) make to allocate resources. Two of the most widely used economic indicators are the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Consumer Price Index (CPI). 

Students enrolled in an undergraduate degree program in business administration will likely be exposed to introductory coursework in economics as the basis for an understanding of strategic planning, management and analytics, and how market conditions inform business decision-making.

Data is one of the most valuable assets a business can have, and in today’s technology-driven environment, businesses capture, store and analyze massive amounts of it to track consumer behavior, predict business outcomes and improve both customer experiences and engagement. 

If using data analytics to solve business problems is something you’re eager to do, you’ll be happy to know that it’s at the core of the curriculum in DeVry’s Bachelor’s Degree with a Specialization in Business Intelligence and Analytics Management. Coursework in this bachelor’s degree specialization covers analysis and execution, technical skills, information technology administration and management, critical thinking, complex problem solving and more to help prepare you to pursue career opportunities in business administration and technical management.

Core courses like these are designed to develop your management skills and help you learn the basics of managerial theories and responsibilities. This area encompasses several aspects of modern business administration, including human resources, planning and organizing, and business communication. Coursework in leadership and teamwork helps to develop capabilities and gives you practice with decision making, critical thinking and problem solving. Relevant case studies are used to develop the strategic planning and leadership skills required to navigate the modern global business environment.

The ability to make objective decisions based on data is an important skill for anyone in a business administration or management role. Skills in critical thinking and decision making are elemental to business administration and are the focus of DeVry courses like Principles of Management and Statistics for Decision-Making.

Choosing a major requires careful thought, especially if you’re still figuring out your long-term career aspirations. But that’s exactly why this kind of degree might be a good fit for some students. The curriculum in DeVry’s Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration covers the wide range of concepts we talked about and are complemented by general studies in humanities, mathematics, social sciences and communications, making for a well-rounded education that can be put to work across many different industries and career paths. 

Business administration requires a variety of technical and workplace skills. Soft skills, like time management and attention to detail, will be important as you travel on this educational journey. This list of resume-building skills applies to anyone planning to pursue a career in business administration:

Studying business administration can help prepare you to pursue a wide variety of careers, including business management roles in operations, administrative services, industrial production and social and community service. A career as a sales manager, financial analyst, cost estimator or management analyst could also be options to consider. 

At DeVry, coursework in our Bachelor’s in Business Administration degree program is taught by experienced professors with real-world skills that are applicable in today’s workplace. And because the program has achieved accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP), you can be confident that it meets the ACBSP’s standards for excellence in business education.^**

Another benefit to preparing to pursue a career in business administration is a favorable job outlook. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment in business and financial occupations to grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2022 to 2032, with about 911,400 job openings projected each year, on average, over the decade.¹ This growth is projected on a national level and local growth will vary by location. This projection is not specific to DeVry University graduates and may include earners at all stages of their careers.