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Using library resources to enhance your commercial awareness
Whichever career path you choose to take, in or beyond academia, it is important that you are commercially aware of the business and sector that you want to work in.
Improving your commercial awareness will help:
- you better understand specific sectors and the companies within them
- identify companies you may wish to work for
- discover and better understand role types
- identify a gap in a sector that could be filled by your product/business
- understand potential customers and competitors
- enable you to demonstrate awareness of a sector and company during the application process
“Research the company that you are interested in, look at their annual report, look at what’s driving them, look at how they have done in the last few years.
[Researching a company ahead of an interview] is important as 1) it shows that you’re interested in the company and 2) it shows that you’ve got a more rounded understanding of what the company has done. Research is really important!”
Dr Gary Gates (Senior VP, Pearson VUE), on the importance of increasing your commercial awareness ahead of an interview
Become commercially aware
Your university library could be an invaluable research resource you can use to develop your commercial awareness of businesses and sectors that interest you.
See below for some examples of the services and databases which may be offered by your university library.
The precise resources and databases available will vary between university libraries so check with your specialist librarians which ones are available to you.
Company and market databases
Your university’s library may subscribe to company databases, which provide financial information, these are used extensively in the commercial world and are considered professional knowledge bases.
There are many more, check with your librarian to find out which databases your institution uses.
Examples of these include:
Full text articles in business magazines, scholarly journals and trade publications. Also, incudes case studies, conference proceedings, country economic reports, company profiles, industry reports, interviews, market research reports, SWOT analysis and working papers.
News and business information from a range of sources, including UK national and regional newspapers, international newspapers and newswires, and foreign language news sources in Dutch, French, German, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. It also provides business information from professional and trade magazines, company profiles and industry reports from a variety of sources.
A world leading provider of commercial intelligence covering every major industry and marketplace in the world. Insight includes reports and profiles on major companies, industries, cities and countries.
Streaming resources
Your university library may provide access to a streaming audio-visual collection that can help you with your research into companies. This includes documentaries, TV and radio programmes, case studies and lectures. Some resources can be searched via the library’s academic search engine but some can only be searched directly.
Examples of these include:
A streaming service that provides access to over 18,000 films and documentaries. Think Netflix for Academics. It is organised into categories that you can browse such as Business (which has a strong company focus). You will then be able to browse subcategories such as case studies which give insights into some big companies.
Box of Broadcasts is a service from the British Film and Video Council that enables you to record and view TV and radio online from over 65 free-to-air channels in the UK, including an archive of over 1,000,000 programmes. You can keyword search for a company to see if it is mentioned, you can filter your results to the newest broadcast so you can be as up to date as possible with the information you view.
Henry Stuart Talks (Business and Management Collection) contains over 900 specially prepared online video lectures and case studies by experts from business, industry, the professions and academia. New content is added regularly, and the lectures and presentations can be filtered by subject area.
Newspapers and trade press
Your university library may also provide access to newspapers including the Financial Times, and all other major business publications via databases such as Nexis. Newspapers can useful for learning how a company is perceived and how they are performing.
Trade press or publications are non-academic journals which are an industries’ main publication channel to keep industry insiders up to date. There are professional and trade publications associated with many industries for example: Marketing Week, Nursing Times, Computer Weekly and The Economist. You can search for these using the academic search engine or in databases such as Business Source Complete.
Funding opportunities
Your university may provide you with access to Research Professional, an online database which provides information on funding opportunities and reach policy.
If not, you can sign up to the newsletters and funding alerts of all the funding bodies relevant to you via their websites. To keep up to date with higher education policy in the UK you could subscribe to WonkHE.
Not available to you?
If you do not have access to a university library, there are still many easy and free ways that you can increase your commercial awareness and develop your skills in this area.
Examples of these include:
- LinkedIn is a huge asset for finding out more about companies, industries and individual roles. Visit our LinkedIn resources to find out how to get started. This includes the Basics of a LinkedIn profile, Personal branding and positioning using LinkedIn parts 1 and 2 and Overcoming barriers to using LinkedIn.
- Job Boards such as Indeed and Glassdoor are great resources to find out more about what it is like to work for individual companies and the job roles available
- Visit our resource on why commercial awareness is a coveted skill to many employers
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