Speaker 1: Hello everyone, welcome to Talent and Skills Hub. My name is Dr. Fred Oballa and I want to appreciate you for choosing to watch this video. In our previous videos, we have discussed about personal analysis. We saw a simple step by step process of conducting a detailed personal analysis with a template that will guide you in doing so. Also, we have discussed about personal analysis of fashion industry and personal analysis of beauty industry. In today's tutorial, we are going to look into how to conduct a SWOT analysis. So I'm going to explain to you a simple step by step process of conducting SWOT analysis. But before we go into that, if you have not subscribed to the channel, please, I will be glad if you subscribe in order to be receiving other videos that we'll be publishing on the channel. Thank you very much for connecting and thank you very much for subscribing. Let's go into the discussion about how to conduct SWOT analysis. And we are going to start that by looking into first the meaning of SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is a tool for documenting internal strengths and weaknesses in your business, as well as external opportunities and threats. In that case, the S stands for strengths, the W stands for weaknesses, the O stands for opportunities, and the T stands for threats. You can use SWOT analysis to assess your organization to understand the impacts of those elements, those four elements on your business operations, strategy and decision making. So by conducting SWOT analysis, you are trying to understand the impact of your strengths on your business operations, strategy and decision making the impact of your weaknesses, the impact of possible or potential opportunities, and the impact of potential or real threats on your business operations, business strategy and decision making. Also, SWOT analysis can also help you to interpret the findings of your PESTO analysis. In that case, it is always good that you first conduct your PESTO analysis to understand the external environment, then you use your SWOT analysis to interpret them in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then you will use the information that you obtain from your SWOT analysis to plan your business, set your targets and achieve your goals. Then, how can you conduct SWOT analysis? I'm going to explain to you five simple steps to conduct SWOT analysis of your organization. And number one step is you need to research about the business, industry and markets. That is before you begin your SWOT analysis, you need to do some research to understand your business, understand the industry where your business is operating, and understand the markets. You can get a lot of knowledge or understanding by talking to your staff, your business partners, as well as your clients, they will be able to share with you some insights, some tangible information about what they understand about your organization, what they see as your strengths, what they see as your weaknesses, what they see as your opportunities, the opportunities that you can exploit, as well as some possible threats or real threats that your business could be exposed to. Also, you can do some market research to understand what your competitors are doing. All this will be able to help you to move into step two, which is about listing down your business strengths. So that in that case, you are identifying and listing what you think your business strengths are. For example, your strength could be your employees, available skills in the company, financial resources, your business location, cost advantage and competitiveness. So at this stage of analysis, the list does not need to be definitive. Any ideas and thoughts are encouraged. Just write down everything that comes to your mind. Everything that you think is what you are good at. Then some of the questions that could help you to identify your strengths are what advantage does your business have over others? What do you do better than any other one, any other person else? What unique or lowest cost resources can you draw upon that others cannot? What do the people in your market perceive as your strengths? So what are the things that the people you talk to, the people you spoke to in your step one, what do they tell you as your strengths? And what factors help you to win businesses? Also, what do you think is your unique selling proposition? All this will be able to give you the answers about what might be or what are your strengths or the strengths of your business. Then with that you move into step three, which is about listing the business weaknesses. List everything that you think or consider to be weaknesses. For example, so many things that you could consider to be a disadvantage compared to others. They are your weaknesses. So your weaknesses include probably an absence of new product or clients, you're not getting new clients, or you're not producing new product to compete with the competitors. That is a weakness to you. Maybe your staffs are always calling off absentees. That is a weakness, lack of intellectual property, you produce something but you cannot protect it. That is a weakness. Declining market share, your market share is reducing or decreasing. That is a weakness. Also, make sure that you address every weakness that you have raised in your SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is not for formality's sake. It is for you to be able to carry out actions in order to address every negative things and enhance the positive ones. Therefore, if you are addressing your SWOT analysis, and you are conducting your SWOT analysis frequently, you will find out that some weaknesses you identify today could actually will no more be weakness tomorrow, because probably you have dealt with them and have addressed it. But at the same time, you can also discover that you will now find out new weaknesses. That indicates that your business is actually progressing, and there is improvement. Because once you overcome one weakness, definitely another weakness is sure to come. And that shows improvement in your business process. Some of the questions that would help you to understand your weaknesses or identify your weaknesses are, what could you improve? What could you avoid? What are the people's opinion or perception about you in the market? What factors cause you to lose business? Any answer you obtain from these questions stand for stand as your weakness. Then we move to step four. That is when you list potential opportunities for your business. Think about every possible external opportunities, your opportunities could come from the political environment, the economic environment, the social environment, the technological environment, the legislative environment, and the environmental factors. So anything that you might consider to be a potential opportunity, you write them down. Remember, these are not the same as your internal strengths. An item cannot be a strength and also an opportunity. Also, an item cannot be an opportunity and also a threat. So you have to put them in the right place where they belong. Opportunities could include something like new technology, training programs, partnership, introducing a new product to keep up with consumer trends, a diverse marketplace, and as well as a change of government that is working in your favor. That is a potential opportunity. Some of the questions we could ask in order to identify your opportunities are, what can you spot as good opportunity in the market? What are the interesting trends that you can be aware of? All this will enable you to put down some answers. And the answers will stand as potential opportunities for your business. Then we'll move into step five, which is the last step. And there you are listing potential threats to your business. List every factors from the external environment that could be a threat or cause a problem for your business. Example of threats include rising unemployment, increasing competition, higher interest rates or higher tax rates, uncertainty of global markets or uncertainty in the business environment. All these could actually stand as a threat to stop you from achieving success. And some of the questions that you could ask in order to identify your threats includes, what obstacle do you face? What are your competitors doing? So what are the things they are doing that could make them to become better than you? Are quality standards, compliance requirements or specification for your business, product or services changing? And what effects could they have on your business by the nature of the changes? Is changing in technology threatening your position in the markets? Do you have bad debt or cash flow problems? Do you have bad review from the customers? All these could actually be a serious threat to you. And also some of your weaknesses can actually turn to become threats to you. So in that case, you need to be able to address them in order to identify them. Once you have completed the steps above, you have four separate lists. Ideally, this list can be displayed side by side so that you can have an overall picture of what stands as your strengths, what stands as your weaknesses, what stands as your opportunities, and what stands as your threats. So in that case, you may use a template like this, where you position your strengths as against your weaknesses, your opportunities as against the threats. In that case, the whole idea is, you will be able to see how you could use your strengths to overcome your weaknesses, how you could use your strengths to exploit your opportunities, and how you could use your strengths to fight or navigate around the threats that your business could actually be exposed to. At the end of the day, this could be an example of the list you could have as related to your business. So this could be a template to guide you in doing a SWOT analysis. So that is a simple step by step of conducting SWOT analysis. In summary, the five steps involved in conducting a detailed SWOT analysis include number one, understand your business, your market, and the industry. And number two step is list down everything that you think would be considered as your strengths. Number three is to list down everything that you consider to be your weakness. Number four is to list everything that you consider to be a potential opportunity for you. And number five is to list down everything that you consider to be a threat that your business could be exposed to. By the time you have this information in four different ways, you'll be able to have the overall picture that will enable you to devise the strategy that will enable you to overcome those weaknesses, exploit your opportunities and fight your threats or navigate around your threats. Thank you very much for watching. And please remember to subscribe in order to be receiving other videos that we'll be publishing on the channel. Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai