It matters not if you are a job seeker or an already engaged professional looking to broaden your work scope/find a new job, commercial awareness is a skill that will elevate you and automatically make you a highly sought-after professional in your field/industry.

First off, commercial awareness is a skill that directly refers to your knowledge of what obtains in your industry; how things work, etc. If you like, you can substitute commercial for organisational awareness or even business awareness. It all boils down to the same thing; are you familiar with how your industry is run?

Working in any industry or sector is so much more than getting a degree in whatever capacity and expecting to stop there while aiming for a lucrative job, now, that would be deluding oneself! In order to create value for any company that will hie you, there has to be proof that you actually have what it takes to occupy such a position.

This can only be achieved when you dedicate time and resources to know and understand the intricacies of the business, no matter the industry.

Let’s play a scenario, say for instance you want to work as a talent manager in the music industry, first, you need to understand how the music industry works, the power players, how they roll, what it takes to spot raw talent and harness that talent and ensure the artist is well received by his/her target audience and the artist’s songs are properly marketed and even the kind of audience is properly suited to the artiste’s kind of music and so much more!

How do you go about this? Constant research, keeping up with those already in the industry, making contacts and seeking mentors. Same applies to all industries, the approach will be different but ultimately, you need to do a lot of work to keep up with what is current.

Commercial awareness is important because things change, new frontiers are explored every day, it is the same reason an academic syllabus from 1959 is obsolete today, it is also the same reason why even computer systems have various upgrades, according to year or model. There are new ideas and approaches every day, you wouldn’t want to hold strongly to knowledge considered old in your industry and believe you will get the best offers, that is impossible, so, do your bit.

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