What is SWOT analysis? Examples of SWOT

SWOT is one of the easiest and most effective methods of analysis. It can be applied both to business processes (such as determining market positions or validating new product ideas) or personal decisions (such the progress of career).

The acronym SWOT stands for:

The development of SWOT is credited to Albert Humphrey, who tested the approach in the 1960s and 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Developed for business and based on data from Fortune 500 companies, the SWOT analytical process has been adopted by organizations of all types as an aid to making decisions.

These four categories encourage you to think about:

• What is now:
  • what positive advantages exist now - strengths,
  • what needs to be improved and existence of blind spots - weaknesses.
• What can happen:
  • what possibilities are around, which ones can be utilized - opportunities,
  • what risks and worst-case scenarios exist, and which ones can happen - threats.

The point of a SWOT analysis is to help you develop a strong business or personal strategy by making sure you’ve thought about and seriously considered these four categories.

Below you can see two example of SWOT analysis, the first one is for an existing company that needs a new strategy and the second one is for job hunting.

Both were created with the CayenneApps tool for SWOT analysis and are available for you as samples here. So we encourage you to use these samples for help and inspiration and start experiment with your own SWOT analysis in practice.

You can also read more details about SWOT analysis here: How to conduct SWOT analysis

Sample SWOT analysis - an existing company:

Sample SWOT analysis - job hunting:

Below you can see example SWOT analysis for career development created with the CayenneApps tool for SWOT analysis: