Tips & Advice

What Commercial Awareness ISN'T: How NOT to think About Commercial Awareness

Tafadzwa Mupfururi, one of our STRIVE mentors and trainee at Clyde & Co, shares his commercial awareness tips.

Judging from my experience and journey to getting a vacation scheme before securing a training contract, I believe commercial awareness is something that can be easily complicated in the mind of an aspiring solicitor. Because there is an understanding of its importance and how law firms emphasise it, it is easy to develop a complex mindset about commercial awareness to the extent that you will fail to develop it in a productive way. In this blog post, I explain what commercial awareness is not and the wrong way of thinking or approaching commercial awareness. One of the things that most candidates stumble on at the assessment centre is the case study and/or group presentation where the recruiter is looking at how you are applying the commercial awareness that you have. I am hoping that after reading this post you will have an idea of what pitfalls to avoid as far as applying commercial awareness in real life is concerned.