Presentation Skills

"There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave."

Dale Carnegie

We all want to give interesting, effective and memorable presentations. Your main objective as a presenter is to deliver a message. Your presentation is your pitch. To deliver that pitch perfectly, you need to borrow from a variety of fields; psychology, art & design, IT, politics and of course your own domain which is the subject of the presentation.

To deliver a great presentation you must use all of these domains, which means you must master the following:

• Understand the psychology of your audience and prepare your message accordingly to appeal to their emotions and get maximum results.
• Create a “wow” factor by using the latest IT tools and technology to put your ideas together and organise your content.
• Appeal to the artistic side of your audience and design your presentation to look professional.
• Deliver with confidence to show that you understand your own content and appear convincing.
• Leave a long lasting positive effect on your audience so that they would never forget your message.

This course covers all of the above areas by using a variety of interactive and practical exercises which prepare the delegates for their ultimate presentation.

This course explores the latest methodologies used in delivering presentations. In our experience, there are two types of delegates:

• Inexperienced or new. This course teaches the delegates how to gather their content, how to make their slides (if any is needed), how to deliver and how to make their message stand out from others.
• With experience. Experienced presenters suffer from bad habits accumulated over time and also lack of knowledge of new tools and techniques since they picked up the knowledge years ago. This course helps these delegates to master the skill through many hands on exercises so they can leverage their current experience to polish their presentations and deliver as good as they are capable of.

The course focuses on the latest practices in presentation skills especially in business and academic environments. Much has changed in recent years and the ever increasing range of presentation tools and their respective feature-set has allowed many presenters to fall to the trap of feature overuse. To address these issues, the course covers a set of best design practices so delegates know what to avoid during the preparation and delivery of their presentations.

It is established that the best way to learn is by example. Many visual examples of good and bad content are provided which help the delegates to quickly understand what works and what doesn’t.

Schedule

The course contains a pre-course assignment where delegates need to prepare a presentation. During the course, they will learn how to improve their presentation and at the end, they will deliver this presentation once more to be evaluated based on a set of performance criteria. Instructions and forms are provided in the package. There is enough content in this course to run it over two days and you may need to do this if you have many delegates to teach. In this case, delegates can practice their presentation at home after learning a number of key topics during the first day and proceed to present their updated version during the second day for evaluation and feedback.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Presentation Types

• What are the implications of the size of the audience?
• How to approach the design of a presentation and learn which areas you need to focus on most?
• What types of presentations exist and what are the differences between them?
• How different types of audiences dictate different kinds of presentations?

Approach

• What techniques can you use to engage the audience such as laughter, story-telling, etc.?
• What can you do to make your presentation viral so that your audience will spread your message through word of mouth?
• How to make an engaging story that your audience will remember
• How to have an impact
• How to start your presentation to fully engage your audience

Preparation

• What steps do you need to take to prepare a presentation from a blank sheet all the way to a comprehensive presentation?
• How to use interactive content to engage the crowd
• What types of content you need to produce?
• What questions do you need to ask yourself?

Structure

• How to use a minimal slide design to get maximum effect
• How to do storyboarding
• How to structure the slides to get maximum effect
• What to avoid when designing your slides?
• Why certain popular features of common presentation software packages such as Power Point are not useful and what can you do about them?
• How to avoid “Death by Power Point”
• How to place various components such as text, images and headings on your slides for maximum clarity and impact

Delivery

• How to deliver a presentation with reduced anxiety
• How to have the correct body language so you come across as a ‘great’ presenter
• How to become a communicator rather than act only as a presenter
• How not to bore the crowd
• How to handle questions

Environment

• How to take advantage of the environment
• What not to do during presentations which may undermine you or your message?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 or 2 days. The course contains a lot of content and many practical exercises that can easily be extended to cover more than one day.

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify the fundamental parameters of a good presentation
• Engage your audience and get their fullest attention
• Prepare your story, understand what you want to show and record it
• Design high-impact slides that deliver your message efficiently
• Deliver your presentation with confidence and leave a positive and memorable experience for the audience
• Control your environment to have the highest impact

Presenting is all about having an impact. You want everyone to understand your message and get it to stick. This course addresses these concepts using the latest trends in presentation design and delivery.

After all, a presneter wants to make a viral message so that everyone will end up talking about. As a trainer, you can use the same techniques to make sure your delegates will learn the core message.

The best way to learn is usually by example. This course uses many examples to teach the delegates what’s good and what’s bad, and more importantly it tells them why. When we are confronted with a blank sheet, which a presentation is really like one, we have infinite number of choices. This is probably why it is easier to make a bad presentation than a good one. With all the choices, tools, resources and data available these days, it is natural for delegates to cram all the information into the slides and hope for the best.

This course teaches them how not to overwhelm their audience. The slides used in the training course also try to set an example (where possible) so that the delegates can see for themselves how this will all play out in the real world. They will learn to appreciate different types of audience and learn how to respond to them accordingly.

There are also many practical activities helping the delegates to try it out themselves. If the delegates have access to computers during the course, they can use instructions and example exercises provided to try it out themselves. On the other hand, if delegates don’t have access to computers, there are other types of exercise included to help them understand the concept in another way.

The aim is to get the delegate to practice and make mistakes in a controlled environment, so they can see where they need to improve themselves.

Many issues such as fear of public speaking, anxiety, body language, tone of voice and even attitude are explored and issues are addressed using a number of targeted mini-exercises.

In short, the course is designed to raise the standards of delegates’ presentation skills quickly, efficiently and maximally so that when they deliver the next time, their audience will be in awe!