Presentation Training Skills

Presentations training courses are provided across the United States and Canada. Participants have three options to attend and participate in our presentation training. Presentations are delivered via public open enrollment courses in all major metropolitan areas and are also available to be delivered on-site via private courses. The 3rd option is to attend Online Webinar Presentations Skills Workshops. Our face to face presentation training courses can be provided as off-the-shelf sessions, ready to be delivered to a diverse audience or can be customized to provide a tailored and personalized presentation training approach based on client needs. All presentations courses are limited to a maximum of twelve participants so as to increase presentation course effectiveness and provide the individual level of face to face or online coaching and interaction that is associated with the Presentations Training Skills Center.

For more information on our presentations skills training courses please contact us.

Presentation Course - PowerPoint Slides: Too Little of a Bad Thing?

Hopefully by now everyone at least knows that you can seriously damage your audience if you create and use poorly designed PowerPoint slides. The number one offence that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that a slide that has been overloaded with text and numbers (a) doesn't work, and (b) puts your audience to sleep. Good news - this problem has been solved!

Blogger Laura Bergells has lamented the current state of PowerPoint presentations. Her main point is that most people have gotten the message that too much information is a bad thing. However, she objects to the way that we are currently solving it - by removing basically all of the information from our PowerPoint slides and replacing it with pretty pictures.

She's got a good point - I've started doing this over the past year or so. However, in my own defense, I only started doing it because I saw that Steve Jobs was doing it and everyone was just raving about his presentations.

I sorta don't have the heart to tell Laura that it's probably going to get worse (in her opinion) before it gets better. A new presentation format in which you only get twenty slides and can show each one for "only" twenty seconds (for a total of 6 minutes 40 seconds) is catching on. This presentation style is called Pecha Kucha, and was started by two architects in Tokyo as part of a designers' show and tell.

So what's a presenter to do? First off, I think that we all need to sit down and have a quick reality check. Why do we give presentations? These are actually pretty poor ways of teaching new material. Adults learn in all sorts of different ways and listening to spoken words (and looking at PowerPoint slides) doesn't do it for most of your audience (especially the younger ones raised on multimedia).

What this means is that you've got to decide why you are REALLY there. The list is pretty short - convince the audience that your view is correct, get them to agree to take some action, educate them on some new piece of information, or simply to amuse them.

Keeping the "back to basics" concept in mind, we should remember that PowerPoint slides don't deliver the presentation by themselves. Instead, their whole reason for being is to help the presenter. It's when we rely on our slides too much that we start to lose our audience.

So can you use a slide that has a lot (but not too much) information on it? The answer is YES. However, you can't spend too much time on it and your certainly can't read the contents of the slide off to your audience. Remember, the slide is a tool, not the presentation itself.

What should the ideal PowerPoint presentation look like? In a nutshell, it should look like it was designed to support the words that are being spoken. This will involve a lot of visual imagery ("pretty pictures") and SOME detailed slides if they are needed.

It's how the detailed slides are used that will differ from presentations of old. Show the detailed slide, make your point in an unhurried manner, and then move on. Additional information can be provided on your web site, in handouts, or in pod-casts that your audience can use to learn more AFTER your presentation.

Source: Dr. Jim Anderson link

Related: Presentation Course