Effective Presentation Skills Essay Example

Presentation Skills

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