Commercial awareness

About the course

Developing better commercial awareness involves understanding both the external environment and your organisation’s place within it. However, this free course, *Commercial Awareness*, encourages you to look within your organisation and at your own role within it. By gaining different perspectives and widening your existing ones, you can enhance your commercial awareness significantly.

This course focuses on the internal environment of your organisation, viewing it as a complex entity full of interrelationships and interactions. You will build on – and critically assess – the concept of a ‘value chain’ within your organisation. While 'value' is crucial to commercial awareness, it is created by a connected network of agents rather than a simple linear chain. Together, these agents generate the added value of an organisation.

Throughout the course, you will develop maps of your organisation and your communication network, helping you locate yourself within this complex picture. This complexity may present challenges and barriers to developing commercial awareness, but it will also provide a richer understanding of your organisation. By the end of the course, you will have a better appreciation of the value your business generates and the contributions you make to that value, putting you in a more commercially aware state.

What you'll learn

Articulate what an organisation exists to do: the value it creates
Appreciate a personal position within the organisation and how others relate to it
Relate the concept of a value chain to a personal working context, whilst acknowledging much more complex interrelationships within the organisation.

Instructors

4 courses
0 students
Open University Open Learn
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