Presentation Skills
Training Exercises and Resources

In this exercise, delegates practice delivering a quick sales pitch. The structure of the pitch is based on the FAB methodology; Features, Advantages and Benefits. Most people miss the advantage and instead focus too much on features. This exercise helps them to understand the significance of benefits and advantages over features.

This is a creativity exercise in a form of a template that you can customise in a variety ways. The format is that the group comes into possession of a large number of a certain used old product. The groups need to think of creative ways to sell them. Naturally, teams that can work together and use systematic creative methods have a higher chance to come up with novel ideas.

Good presentation skills and public speaking require multitude of skills; creativity, storytelling, creative slide design, engaging attitude, emotional content, effective non-verbal gestures and so on. Apart from good slide design, it is also important for presenters to focus on delivery skills to properly showcase what they show in the slides.

The modern practice of delivering presentations strongly encourages the use of images in slides. Hence, a presenter must be capable of showing an image and then deliver a key related message while the image is shown while using hand gestures, meaningful body posture, expressive arm placement and other non-verbal signals.

This exercise helps delegates to focus on this specific area and practice the skill.

Instructional methods can be divided into one-way and two-way methods. In the one-way method, the direction of the information is from the instructor to the audience. In the two-way method, information is exchanged in both ways. These methods are also known as content-centred or learner-centred activity. In practice, lectures are generally one-way and training courses are two-way.

The methods in each style are quite different but they both have their uses. Lectures are suitable for a large audience, where interaction is not possible or time consuming. Even though lectures are very useful as a teaching method, delivering a training course in the form of a lecture is not recommended as the training session could become boring and unproductive. This article explores the one-way instructional method and suggests solutions to make the experience more interactive or memorable without losing the benefits of a lecturing activity.

This is another Interactive Pause exercise used during a lecture or talk to help the participants to quickly go over the content they have just been thought and record the key points. These kinds of exercises encourage participation in learning environments where you are forced to use a one-way instructional method such as lecturing.

This activity is useful as an add-on to lectures, talks or presentations to make them more interactive and memorable. An interactive pause used during or after a lecture stops the current flow of content and allows the audience to do something about what they have just learned. This helps them to go over the content quickly and also participate before the speaker moves  on to more complex topics. This exercise is an example of such an interactive pause delivered at the end of a lecture or a talk.

Just about everybody is involved in either teaching or learning or both. If you are a trainer, your job is highly biased towards the teaching side which means you need to understand how to train your delegates in the shortest amount of time and get maximum results. This requires a deep understanding of how learning and memory works in humans. Otherwise you could easily be wasting your time as your knowledge will not ‘sink’ into the minds of your delegates.

In this article you will be introduced to a set of core features of our short and long term memory and understand its direct impact on training which you can take advantage of to increase retention and learning.