MAKING A PRESENTATION IN YOUR WORKPLACE

Michael Chimeremma Nwadialor

A lot of employees figdet when they are chosen in their workplaces to make a presentation in meetings to executives, trustees, new employees, potential investors etc. But people make successful presentations, this is because they know and apply the Dos and Don’ts. 

Many years ago modern tools, softwares and programs that provide templates for presentations and made presentations easy were not available but today they are almost everywhere.

They are easily accessible, affordable and quickly ‘learnable’ as well. Some of these technologies include Projectors, smartphones, PowerPoint etc and they can make a presentation insightful, effective and successful.

It is therefore important that you take time to research, construct your writings and design visuals in your slideshows, rehearse and follow the outlined tips to come out with positive responses to your call to action.

The following are ways by which one can make good presentations in his or her work environment:

1. Write down your presentation

first, you have to know what you are to talk about and the best approach because a good presentation will surely give your career opportunity a face-lift. All must be penned down. Create a simple standard outline before you begin your write-up. Beginning from introduction to its conclusion.

1. Engage your audience

 in order to grab the attention of your audience, you can tell a compelling story, ask rhetorical questions that will strike a cord in the mind of your audience thereby evoking a mental picture of what you are driving at.

Do not make it too engaging because they are there to listen to you and not the other way around. Little jokes and participation are secondary but very useful.

1. Use compelling and apt visuals in your slideshows

Data (local and international, past, present and future) can be better understand via visual aids. Use your slideshows to show these statistics but be careful not to be noisy, by this I mean be careful not to bore your audience with an overload of text (information and data) in one slide.

4. Tailor your terminologies to fit your audience:

If you are to give a solid orientation to new employees, your presentation will be based on their fields of expertise and nature of their new work environment. If you are making a presentation to investors, you have to talk more about what benefits they stand to gain from investing their resources with your organisation.

Your writing and tone must be adjusted to the kind of audience you are to address.

5 Make it coherent and apt.

A lot depends on your presentation, but you might not have all the time in the world. Your presentation might be set to a maximum of 30 minutes, this simply calls for aptitude and coherence. If you want your audience to leave with something valuable, take your presentation seriously by ensuring that what you are presenting flows and the dots related.

 In order to achieve excellence, do some rehearsals in front of a colleague or friend so that you can ask them if you were apt and if your presentation was understandable. Remember to work with time.

In conclusion here are some ‘take-homes’. First sribble some ideas down and while creating your slides you have to choose your platform, pick a template that best suits your audience and select a consistent design- Consistency will enable your audience to remain in rapt attention but inconsistencies would easily distract them.

One very important thing to do away with is noise, I mean excessive text in your slides. While using graphs, charts and other visual tools can be so beautiful in depicting, be sure not to make errors with values that you input.

It is therefore advised to go through your graphs and charts over and over again. The key is simple – do not be too confident, rather rehearse assiduously and you’ll come out successful.