How To Develop Effective Presentation Skills

We've all heard about people's number one fear being public speaking. Being able to overcome that will help you develop effective presentation skills.

I decided to come up with some tips that might help people develop effective presentation skills. Here's my Top 5 Tips to help give a great presentation. In order to develop effective presentation skills you need to...

1) Know you subject. Sounds obvious, but bear with me. Everyone in your department may know the subject as well as you do, but that doesn't stop you from finding a fresh spin on the topic. Instead of giving a dull, emotionless statistics why not try finding a vivid, imaged-filled comparison? Example, instead of telling us how many miles it is from the Earth to the Moon you could tell your listeners how many buses would stretch end to end.

Also, what point are you making with your presentation? You can't just talk and talk at length showing them slide after slide of text until your time is up. Get clear on what message you want to convey to your listeners. Then everything that you say and show them has to be connected to your main message, if it's not it's gone!

And please - don't clutter your slides up with mountains of text. Have clear succinct bullet points that encapsulate what it is you want to present. Then tell them the rest. You should be expanding upon the ideas in your bullet points and delivering them with all your panache, not mindlessly reading them off the screen.

2) Structuring. Just like a good novel or film your presentation needs a beginning, middle and an end. If it will help you can use the old reliable "tell 'em format":

"tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em and tell 'em what you told 'em".

Try your best to provide your listeners with new information or put a new interpretation on existing information. Remember, what you want to give them is great content not soulless spin!

3) Relevancy. Keep asking yourself is what your presenting relevant to your main message and relevant to your listeners? If it isn't then bin it and find something that is. I've been in the audience listening to a presenter thinking "how is this relevant to me?" And I never found out. I never found out because it wasn't relevant to me.

4) Enthusiasm. Try to let your enthusiasm for your subject come through without being too over-the-top and evangelical. If you're not passionate and enthused by your subject why should we be?

5) Practise. Practise, practise and practise some more! You can't hope to develop effective presentation skills if you don't go over it before-hand. In order to nail it and win over your listeners you need to know the presentation better than the back of your hand. Make sure you know how the equipment works and what to do if there are any technical problems. Don't just rely on the temp who may or may not be able to help you out.

If you can implement these techniques then you will be on your way to developing effective communication skills!

Jason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Coach based in London, England. For more humour techniques, tips and secrets, check out Jason's Jason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Coach based in London, England. For more humour techniques, tips and secrets, check out Jason's hub page Learn to be Funny