SWOT Analysis Worksheet

A SWOT analysis looks simple on the page: four boxes, four categories, fill them in. What actually makes it hard is that most students have never had to think about a company as a company before. They can name a brand they like. They can't usually explain what might threaten its business model, or where its advantage over competitors actually comes from. A worksheet that just hands over the four-box template doesn't close that gap. Practice does.

This SWOT analysis worksheet puts the thinking in the students' hands from the first step. Each student, or each small group, picks their own company rather than analyzing one assigned to them, which means the research has to hold up to a company they already have opinions about. From there, they work through strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats using two sources at once: their own intuition and outside knowledge about the company, backed up by actual research from news coverage and the company's own website. That combination matters. Intuition alone produces guesses. Research alone produces a list of facts with no analysis behind it. Together, they produce something closer to how an analyst actually works.

For a stock market unit, this is a natural on-ramp to thinking about a company the way an investor does before ever looking at a stock price. A student who has already had to name a real threat to a real company, not a hypothetical one from a textbook, is better prepared to understand why a stock might move on news that has nothing to do with its most recent earnings report. It's also a flexible entry point into a broader investing curriculum: Rapunzl's simulator lets students track a portfolio built around $10,000 in practice capital, and a SWOT analysis is a natural first step before students decide what to put in it.

The four categories also do something a lot of intro-to-investing material skips: they force students to hold two kinds of thinking at once. Strengths and Weaknesses ask a student to look inward at what a company already controls, its brand, its costs, its product. Opportunities and Threats ask them to look outward at a market the company doesn't control at all, competitors, regulation, shifting consumer habits. Most students default to one mode or the other. Some can list a company's strengths all day but freeze on threats, because naming a threat means admitting a company they like could actually lose. Others are quick to spot outside risk but can't articulate what makes a company's position defensible in the first place. Working through all four boxes for the same company is what closes that gap, and it's a skill that carries directly into reading an earnings report or a news headline about a stock later in the unit.

The activity is short by design, built to run as either a single-period assignment or a quick opener before a longer discussion, and it scales cleanly whether students work solo or in groups.

This worksheet comes from Module 1, Welcome to the Stock Market, in Rapunzl's grades 6–12 curriculum.

Welcome To The Stock Market: Classroom Exercise

SWOT Analysis

The purpose of this activity is for students to practice performing SWOT analysis on a company and understand how to think through each section of the analysis.

Part 1: Analysis

Students can work in groups or individually. Each student/group should choose a different company and perform a SWOT analysis. Students should use intuition and prior knowledge to think through a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They should supplement this with information from reputable news sources and the company's website.

Part 2: Record

Students should use the space below to record their observations and the results of their SWOT analysis.

Teacher Notes

Part 1 goes better when students pick a company they already have some familiarity with, since the intuition half of the assignment depends on them having a real opinion to test against research. If a group is struggling to choose, ask what they bought, wore, or used in the last week.

Weaknesses and Threats are consistently the two hardest boxes to fill in, mostly because students default to praising a company they like rather than critiquing it. It helps to point out that a real weakness isn't the same as a flaw students find personally annoying. It's something that could genuinely hurt the company's performance.

Opportunities and Threats also get confused with each other early on. A useful check: an opportunity is something the company could act on, while a threat is something happening whether the company acts or not. Having students sort a few examples out loud before they fill in their own table usually clears this up fast.

Because there's no single correct SWOT for any real company, this activity works well as a group discussion after individual research, comparing what different students found for the same or similar companies.

This activity, along with the rest of the Welcome to the Stock Market unit, lives inside the Rapunzl teacher portal alongside articles, guided lessons, and a classroom investing simulator built for grades 6–12.

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