If you are asked to give a presentation at work or as part of your course, there are many things to take into account.
When giving your presentation you need to be aware of your body language. Stand up straight and don't slouch. You need to get everyone's full attention. Good eye contact is essential because everyone attending feels that they get individual attention.
The way you present your work is also very important. Decide what equipment you are going to use. Are you going to use queue cards, a data show or an over head projector. When you speak in the presentation, your voice needs to be projected out to your audience. Everyone needs to be able to hear and understand what you're saying. Your presentation will require special preparation beforehand and a lot of practice.
Begin your presentation with a greeting before you introduce yourself and then give a short introduction so your audience will know what your presentation is going to be about.
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is ..... and I work as a business manager at ...... company. Today I will be talking about ......."
" My presentation is divided into three parts. Firstly I will be talking about ........... After that we can have a look at .................. Lastly I will tell you ............."
It's a good idea to divide your presentation into different parts and develop them as you progress. Your audience need to know when to ask questions. You can tell them to ask you questions any time during the presentation or after you finish delivering the information.
Find out how much your audience know about the topic you will talk about before you start. If they know most of the information you intend to present, they will be bored and this can make your presentation a big failure. You need to present things that are new to your audience so they will be more attentive to what you have to say.
Giving a presentation to young children will be totally different than giving one in front of senior managing directors of a big firm. Avoid using a lot of jargon in your presentation. Your information needs to be presented using language that is easy to understand by everyone.
Designing a PowerPoint slide show can take a few minutes or many hours depending on your computer skills and how much information you'd like to include in your presentation. There will be no point in designing a PowerPoint slide show if the presentation venue is not equipped with a computer and a data projector. Also keep in mind that technology can let you down when you need it most. There has to be a plan "B" when you give any presentation.
Save your PowerPoint slide show on your memory stick and also email it to yourself as a backup in case anything goes wrong.
Don't include too much information on each slide of your show. Your audience will be distracted by what you have typed and not pay much attention to what you say.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Using pictures and graphs in your PowerPoint slide show can help you convey your ideas to your audience in an easy way and save you a lot of typing too.
At the end of your presentation, invite the audience to ask you questions. Thank the people who ask you questions and do your best to answer them. If you don't know the answer, don't make it up. Promise to get back to them as soon as you find out but see first if anyone attending knows a good answer. You can save yourself the humiliation of not knowing the answer to a question on the topic you were talking about in a smart way.
" Thank you for your question. Let's see if anyone knows an answer to this in the audience."
