Taking part in careers sessions, I have heard that business awareness is one of the top ‘most wanted/least found’ employability skills in surveys of employers.
What is business awareness? How can you demonstrate it at interview?
Business and customer awareness is a basic understanding of the key drivers for business success, and the need to provide customer satisfaction.
Here are my tips for how to demonstrate this during an interview.
- Know what the interviewing organisation does: their chief products and/or services, key locations, biggest customers, chief competitors (their web pages and annual report should give you this – read them!). You can sign up to cuttings services which will send you any press items about your chosen organisations.
- Check out the share price (for educational organisations league table positions serve this purpose) and whether has it changed much in the last year. This is important as it indicates health of the business. If it drops then credit can become expensive or disappear, suppliers won’t part with the materials needed to keep trading, and customers won’t place orders or pay deposits if they don’t think they are going get delivery. It opens up the possibility of takeover and asset stripping. Also, if deferred share packages are used for retention of key staff, the incentive for those people to stay disappears.
- Recognise the importance of controlling costs – and that to control them you need to understand and measure them.
I hope that helps, I always found it a bit unfair that technical recruits and trainees were expected to understand the business side but that business trainees were never asked questions about how the products worked. But that’s life and the business side determines the pay and rations and research budgets so you do need to speak the language and get the bigger picture.
Erica Tyson, IMA University Liaison Officer.
