Essential Soft Skills for the Workplace - Presentation Skills

Presentation slides and visual aids are not the same as notes. Do not just write everything down and read it off to your audience. Visual aids are there to add to a presentation, not replace it. Use it to reinforce your points with graphics or images, but not to repeat your words.

“Visual aids are great, but don’t present the speech to the visual aid.” Barnett advises, “Make sure you don’t turn your back on the audience when demonstrating with the aid. Make sure the visual aids work long before the presentation starts and have a contingency plan if they stop working.”

Are you presenting to your work colleagues or a buyer to whom you’re trying to sell? Your audience plays the largest role in your presentation and how you should structure it. Research your audience thoroughly and think about why they’re listening to you, then give them what they’re looking for. Know your numbers and know the correct presentational style. Work out if jokes will help and if you do intend to use humor, make sure it’s well placed and not risqué – you’re not Chris Rock.

Make sure that the language you’re using is appropriate for the situation. Being too, or not sufficiently, verbose suggests that you aren’t good at reading situations or haven’t prepared correctly. Make sure your presentation is clear and use jargon only when you know your audience will understand it. Questions at the end are a good sign: as long as they’re exploring your presentation, not asking you to explain it.

As a presenter, your job is to keep your audience interested in what you’re saying. Presentations which are too dry or dull will result in spectators who are barely listening and just counting the seconds until you finally stop talking. Try to present in a way which is interesting to your audience. A good method for this is to include story-telling elements (proven to be much more engaging that facts alone). If this method isn’t possible, then simply split up your presentation into sections and keep it short and punchy.

On the prospect of memorizing a speech by heart, Barnett warns that: “If something goes wrong, you run the risk of being less flexible when trying to recover your composure.” Despite this, there are benefits: “The advantage of memorizing a speech is that you can be very precise and ensure that you use suitable vocabulary.”

Making a mistake might seem world-ending, but Barnett suggests it’s not the mistake itself that’s the issue:

“Mistakes aren’t the problem. It’s how you recover from them. I would start by taking a deep breath, then decide whether the audience noticed. If not, I would carry on. If the audience did notice. I would apologize, keep taking deep breaths and try to calmly rectify it. An audience often gains more by seeing a speaker recover well from a mistake than by listening to a speaker who is being too perfect and slick. Mistakes will only make you seem more human and a good recovery will bring you respect from the audience.”

Presentations with a question and answer section can be among the nerve-wracking, with the ever-present threat of not knowing the answer weighing over you. Barnett recommends not worrying too much about this:

“First of all, compliment the audience member on their excellent question, take a few deep breaths, buy some time and if you still can’t think of the answer tell them that you will go and research the issue straight after the presentation and forward the answer to all the delegates present.”

If this is a significant worry, consider your personal experiences. How many times did a teacher get the wrong answer at school? Or an actor miss his line in a play? Or a lecturer get stuck for a response to a question? It happens, people are human. If you deal with it well, no one will remember it.