Skip to main content

Industry awareness

The Industry Awareness element is a key component of the Silver Wolverhampton Enterprise and Employability Award (WEEA). It will assess and allow you to develop your career research skills, your commercial knowledge and your occupational knowledge. 

You will be required to identify a career area that you are interested in working in, research it and convey the most important information from your research through a written or verbal account. 

You need to have a good understanding of the role, organisation and sector in which you will be working, whether you intend to work for an organisation or become self-employed. This understanding is often testing during the selection process through applications and interviews as well as business plans and pitches. 

Conducting thorough research into the career area that interests you also enables you to make choices and well informed plans about it. Turning a career idea into reality requires research so that you can make sure you are doing the right things to get to where you want to be.  

By undertaking this element you will develop and demonstrate commercial awareness, which is often stated in surveys as one of the most important skills required by employers. You will also develop important employability skills and aptitudes such as:

  • Research skills 
  • Ability to organise, analyse and present information effectively 
  • Good written or spoken communication skills 
  • Occupational knowledge  
  • Enthusiasm and commitment to your chosen career area  

The Silver WEEA is embedded into all university courses, so at some point during your studies you will complete the industry awareness element as part of your course. The specific point in at which you will do this depends on your particular course: for some courses silver award elements are embedded at level 4 whereas for others they are embedded at level 5 or 6.

You may like to complete the element independently from your course. For instance, maybe you want to obtain the award at your own pace rather than waiting for the opportunity through your course. Or maybe you did the silver award elements early on in your course and you would like to revisit them because your career ideas and plans have moved on. If you would like to do this element independently you can do this via our Canvas course. Here there you can find full instructions, guidance and resources. You can also submit your work to us for consideration.

The exact brief for the industry awareness element will depend on the way it is embedded in your course. Generally, you are likely to be asked to research a career area related to your interests using relevant resources and create a written or verbal account which pulls together the most important parts of this research.  

You may be asked to focus on:  

  1. A job you would like to do
  2. An organisation that you would like to work in
  3. A sector you would like to work in
  4. A business you would like to set up

If you complete this element independently you can choose to do:

  1. A job study
  2. An organisation study
  3. A sector study
  4. Market research for a business idea

These are the learning outcomes for the industry awareness element:

  1. Identify an area of interest relating to your career 
  2. Research the area of interest using relevant resources 
  3. Produce a written or verbal account of your research 

If you are completing this task independently from your course, full resources and instructions about this element are available on our Canvas topic.

If you are completing this task through your course speak to your module tutor for help, or contact careers@wlv.ac.uk. Some of the resources available on our Canvas topic may also be helpful.

There are a wealth of interactive resources available on CareerSPACE, our careers information portal where you can access interactive tools, videos and e-learning. See www.wlv.ac.uk/careerspace