Course

Having commercial awareness or being commercially aware is an increasingly important skill to improve your success at work. It isn’t something you are born with, but rather a mindset or attitude that needs to be fostered, and it starts with developing your curiosity about your organisation and how it can be successful.

Being curious, asking questions, and seeking answers about the way your own and other organisations work is a good start. Equally, discovering more about customers and competitors, and where your role fits in relation to colleagues, is just as valuable.

This leadership challenge is designed to help you navigate your way towards better commercial awareness. It combines practical activities to practise some important management skills and theory which can assist you in organising your knowledge of your organisation. 

The challenge has been designed to help you gather data, analyse and organise it. Once you have completed the challenge you can then use this information in a number of ways.

You might want to use this for your own interest or career development. It could be used as an induction for new starts, or as a way of brainstorming ideas and options. You may even identify ways to improve your internal organisation or communications.

Think of it as a kind of treasure hunt where the questions require you to figure out where you can find the answers to the questions posed for each of the 5 challenges.

This course was written by Liz Moody of the Faculty of Business and Law, The Open University Business School, and is published with a creative commons licence by The Open University.