How to improve your presentation skills

Here are some tips to make your presentation stand out from the crowd

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Aspire

At some point in your life you may well have sat through a presentation that has felt more like an information dump than an opportunity to take away something new, interesting or useful – and, at the end of it, you’re left wondering – could this have been a PDF, instead?

It’s also noticeable when a presenter is using a slide presentation as a crutch, or relying on it to deflect the audience’s attention from themselves.

Crutches are okay

The fact is that slides can be an excellent aide-mémoire – a helpful tool to remind us of our intended structure and content for a presentation – and a way to add a creative dimension to support the topic in discussion. However, when faced with a lot of information on a slide, audience members can struggle to balance between reading the text and listening to what you are saying.

If you tailor your slides to include just enough clues to remind you what you want to discuss, and in what order, they can help both you and your audience by underlining or enhancing your message.

The audience is interested in YOU

The earlier point about slides deflecting attention from the presenter is important because the audience is probably attending your presentation because of you. You, and your delivery of the information, are the draw for the audience. You are the element that is most interesting about the presentation – otherwise, the content of the presentation could just be conveyed in writing, couldn’t it?

It’s when a slide deck merely replicates information that can be simply sent out as a document for the audience to review that you begin to wonder whether or not the presenter actually knows what they are talking about. The implication could be that the presenter might be reading a whole bunch of text from a slide because they don’t know the content well enough. Place yourself as the focal point of the presentation, rather than the slides.

Make the slides work for you

So, here are some tips to help you ensure that the slides you use in your presentations work for you, enhance your message, and do not distract from what the audience’s focal point should be (yep, that’s right – you).

Top five tips for presenting with slides

• Only share the slides when you need them

Staying true to the idea that the presenter is the most important element of a presentation, by being selective about when to share slides you remain the audience’s primary focus. In the face-to-face setting you can blackout the slides by pressing ‘B’ on the keyboard and bring them back again when the time is right for you by pressing the same key again.

Selective sharing is particularly useful in the online arena. This keeps audience attention levels up by changing the dynamic on their screens as often as possible; if they’re staring at slides for too long, you’re likely to lose them.

• Use keywords

Using choice keywords on your slides helps to convey a clear message and keeps the audience’s attention.

• Avoid overcrowding

Be brief and clear, use bullet points instead of long paragraphs and break the learning into bite-size chunks.

• Direct attention where you want it

If you have no alternative but to include significant amounts of information on a slide or, for example, where you are sharing graphs with a lot of data, simplify things for your audience by highlighting where they should look first. You can do this via slide animation, by telling people, or by simply pointing out what part of the slide you want people to focus on.

• Images: less is more

Use a maximum of two images per slide and pick images that support or enhance your message.