Reply To: Commercial awareness interview questions…

[Peter Watson]

First of all, Xenia, well done on getting your brown belt (as a rank)! CONSISTENCY is what you need to get better with your commercial awareness. This is going to sound blunt, but you are kidding yourself if you think you can improve it by just reading up once a week/month/just before the interview! I’d recommend sitting down and working out, firstly, how much time you want to put towards this on a daily basis (and I would include weekends here as well). You could treat listening to podcasts as an extra outside this because you can probably listen to them while you are doing something else. You also need VOLUME of stories. Again, it’s no good picking out five stories per week and hoping that’ll be enough. You need to read a LOT of stories in order to see what the trends are and to get an idea of what is more important and what is noise. Obviously, you can pick whatever works for you, but I read huge amounts of articles on a daily basis and present you with a distillation of all this EVERY day in Watson’s Daily. I’m trying to save you time so that you can fit as much “quality” in your commercial awareness research as you can!