Effective presentation skills-Part 1

This is one topic you might have read about many times . But , still there is always a scope of improvement , isn’t it ? 🙂

Presentation is something – love it or hate it, you can’t escape it . You might be the “geekiest” guy around , but when it comes to presenting what you know about – it all comes down to the delicate balance you can strike between your soft skills and your technical skills.

As you’d have noticed , I am talking about technical guys here . This is assuming those with management degree get quite a good exposure to brushing their soft skills by the time they join industry. In India ,specially , students from technical degree colleges suffer from a lack of this exposure . So , this particular post , I am writing , keeping in mind a technical presentation for someone who’d like to brush up his basics before heading to make a presentation on a technical topic to make sure it holds up everyone’s interest( i.e. you don’t find anyone napping in the back or worse,front),everyone gets a good understanding of the topic you are about to present and gets how good you are at it ;).

So ,let’s begin.

First ,choose the time of your presentation intelligently . I believe post lunch is not a good time – everyone has a tendency to fall asleep 😛 .Mornings are a great time, everyone is quite receptive for new ideas.Try to choose time , what you think works best to get everyone at their attentive best.

Next is , the most important part of the presentation ie “presentation” itself , ie your ppt as you’d say 🙂 .The content .

While we want to put every ounce of our knowledge out there , we have to take care of a few basic things before plunging into it :

1) Know your audience : First , your presentation content should suit your audience. So , you have to know the target audience first . What is their knowledge level on the subject .If they are novice or new to the topic, you ‘d have to break things down in terms understandable to them.If  they are subject matter experts already , you are free to take jargon to whatever height you may want.It might not be a good judgment on the part of organizer to have a mixed audience , but based on requirement or situation , that can be the case too : in that case you need to start up with the basics and then shoot off in the advanced territory.

2) Know the time limits : Whether it is a 1 hour presentation , 2- hour , full day ? The details you put in the content would have to vary accordingly .Let us just say its a 1 hour presentation ,you ‘d have to make sure you are not having number of slides running in 100s (or 90s or 80s for that matter) for such a small time.

3) Graphics : Add diagrams,tables ,visual representations wherever you can .If you have an alternative to present the information that is captured in long text sentences , into a table – go for the table . It makes information easier to understand and grasp.

4) Work on the agenda – outline the agenda – Content should be logically tied together and coherent and in flow, ie one topic should follow the previous one logically.For example , if you were talking about pollution , you ‘d start with what pollution is ? ->how is it caused ->what are the bad effects ->what are the possible solutions .The example is pretty out of context for a technical guy, but you get the gist , don’t you ?

5) Before you dive right into the technical details , a slide should outline the agenda This will give your audience a mental picture of what all is going to be covered.

Well, as my post says its Part 1 , so I am going to cover the rest in a following post soon after , this ‘s make this one short and sweet 🙂

Next one would talk about the soft skills and a tip that I learnt from a soft skill trainer and works 100% of the times in case of a large audience (~50-60).

Hope it was of some help .

Thanks for Reading.

Deeksha