To really succeed at presenting and build up effective presentation skills, there are several key areas that you need to become skilled in. And once you’ve mastered these skills, you’ll be able to create a presentation with a clear message and deliver it with confidence.
These key skills areas are:-
• Planning and writing the presentation
• Using visual aids effectively
• Overcoming presentation nerves
• Delivering the presentation confidently
• Answering questions competently
Skills for Planning & writing the presentation
Planning the presentation involves much of the work that you’re going to do before you actually deliver the presentation. This is a very important area and its also one that many people should consider improving their skills in.
A key part of this planning is to research your presentation audience, since the more you know your audience, the more you can understand them and what their preconceptions might be.
You also need to get to grips with the purpose of the presentation – so that you are very clear about what you are trying to achieve from it. (This is a skill in itself.)
Then its down brainstorming what you’re actually going to say and then structuring this into “digestable†chunks within the beginning, middle and end.
Using visual aids effectively
Once you’ve done your planning, you need to consider what visual aids you’re going to be using. (aka Powerpoint slides or PowerPoint skills!)
Think about what you want to do here – why you actually need the visual aids in your presentation and what are they going to be used for.
Often they are fairly redundant – people put them in for the sake of it. So some key presentation skills we’ll be looking at are associated with reducing your slides to the minimum you need to support your message.
So we are going to look at how to make visual aids effective and what types of visual aids are going to help you with your presentation.
Skills for overcoming presentation nerves
We’re then going to look at You Yourself! To start considering your personal presentation skills.
When most people when they hear the word presentation – previously built “presentation skills†are often forgotten about and nerves kick in. So we’re going to help you overcome your nerves and become more confident in your personal presentation skills.
There are lots of techniques and things you can do to help you to control your nerves and build your confidence even before you actually start your presentation as well as while you’re speaking and delivering it.
Skills for Delivering the presentation confidently
After that, its important to think about how you’re actually going to deliver your presentation.
We will look at some of the key techniques and skills you can call on to help you speak confidently, keep the audience’s interest, really engage with them and create the presence that want to have in front of your audience.
So your personal resources are very important when you come to deliver your presentation.
Answering questions competently
Finally its important that you have the confidence to interact with your audience and deal with any questions that your audience might throw at you.
So we’ll give you techniques to help you deal with the difficult questions – the different scenarios that you might face when you are actually having to interact with the audience
Summary
So these are the 5 key elements (or presentation skills areas) for building and delivering a successful presentation.
Get to grips with each of them, build your skills and then apply them to you next presentation – and you’ll be surprised just how much you’ve progressed.
