When it comes to business, the word “acumen” is often thrown around a lot. It refers, in principle, to a set of knowledge items and skills that allow you to be more successful in business. It could cover everything from understanding how the tax system works to ensure that you can pick out skills when it comes to making profits.
It’s all well and good understanding what business acumen is on a basic level in this way – but how do you actually go about getting it? There are plenty of ways to do so, from pursuing education to gaining experience. This blog post will, hopefully, provide the answer.
What is business acumen?
There are multiple competing definitions of what business acumen actually is, and finding a definition is likely to depend in large part on whom you ask. But most people who comment on business issues are in agreement that business acumen has some pretty common underpinnings. For example, it often covers the ability of a person to make strong decisions. This is usually in a risk context: a person with good business acumen, for example, might feel they know how to balance the risk/reward ratio in a way that is likely to lead to positive outcomes for the company.
Another common definition of business acumen rests on the idea that those with the skill can help the company look broadly rather than narrowly. By encouraging a “big picture” approach that factors in all of the different strands of the business, how they interlink and what their external threats might be, a person with business acumen can be more strategic about the decisions they take.
Tools for acquiring it
The good news is that there are multiple ways to go about acquiring business acumen. Perhaps the most obvious way is to enroll in a business studies program or business management more generally. The sorts of topics you’re likely to cover in a business studies course are variable, but it’s almost certain that you’ll look at business life cycles (such as starting up, growing, acquiring investment, and mergers and acquisitions) as well as the basics of keeping a balance sheet.
Those who are looking for a higher-level approach to business acumen may consider going for an MBA, which is a Master’s in Business Administration. There are plenty of institutions that offer this degree, including some MBA online options from universities like Aston, so there’s an increasing level of flexibility available when it comes to deciding the best way to accrue business acumen, and institutions are changing with the times.
Another way to pick up business acumen is to get experience in the business world. Many business studies courses will involve some element of gaining practical experience, such as a work placement, and getting out of the classroom can expose you to ways of picking up business acumen on a different level. Say you have a junior role on a placement in a fast-growing business. Your manager or the business owner may immediately spot that you’re keen and eager to learn and therefore expose you to more opportunities to observe what happens.
Often, the best approach is to pair the two. By getting a business education and pairing it with a practical experience in the business world, you can observe applied business acumen from different perspectives and use one to enrich the other.
Finally, another interesting question about business acumen is whether or not it’s something you’re born with or whether it’s something you develop. To some people, business acumen is innate. There’s an argument to say that those who have shown skills in numeracy and a desire to buy and sell from a young age were “born with it.”
While there’s no settled answer to the question, it’s almost certainly the case that picking up business acumen is something you can do even if you haven’t demonstrated a knack for it from an early age. A good education is often the best way of ensuring that you get the skills you need and that you can also apply them in a practical context.
Patience is a virtue
It’s important to have front and center in your mind that business acumen is not necessarily something you can acquire overnight. Studying for a business degree, for example, is not something that you can complete in a short space of time; it can take well over a year of studying to get your qualification.
Even if you enroll in a program that’s not particularly long in timeframes, it’s unlikely to give you instant business acumen on graduation day. As outlined above, you then need to get out into the industry to make sure that you can practice what you’ve learned. There’s no use knowing how to use a price chart, for example, if you then never have to make a significant decision about when the right time is to make a bulk supplier purchase for a particular item your firm needs. Business acumen is not something that you can pick up and learn overnight – but provided that you take a long-term mindset, you can increase the chances of business acumen bedding in.
Ultimately, business acumen is a highly valuable – and indeed wholly necessary – skill to have if you’re looking to make it in this highly competitive field. It’s a way of developing your abilities to be good at business, raise revenues and make more profit, and it offers a chance to make yourself more attractive to your next employer – and, perhaps, more successful once you actually get there. There are multiple ways to acquire it, including everything from educational approaches to experience on the job. And while you’re likely to fall down if you expect to be able to pick it up overnight, those who are willing to commit to acquiring business acumen over the long term can usually get there in the end.
