Preparation

The key to a good and powerful presentation is preparation, as they always say, practice makes perfect! Conduct necessary research and come up with main points or main arguments that you want to focus on and gather facts and examples to support your stand. After that is done, come up with a script and practice it until you know it inside out. With practice, your presentation content will become secondary then you can switch your focus on how to present it properly and effectively.

Know your audience

Preparation before giving a presentation is more than just making sure your notes are in order. It is also important to know who your audience is before starting your presentation. The best way to engage with your audience is to tell them things that they want to hear, you cannot always be spot on about this but with some research beforehand, you can come close. Conduct some research on who will be in the room when you are speaking and what they are expecting or needing from your presentation.

Engage your audience

After getting to know who your audience is, the next step to undertake would be how to properly and effective engage with them during your presentation. Holding someone’s attention for more than 20 minutes is a challenge. Talk about things you know that your audience would be interested in to keep them listening. Include eye contact, hand gestures and even a personal story or two to keep your audience from losing concentration. Don’t be afraid of adding in some humour into your presentation or asking questions and getting your audience involved.

Keep it short

Short and sweet is the way to go when it comes to presentations. Exclude unnecessary details unless you want to bore your audience and waste their time. Keep your presentation relevant and straight to the point, your audience will thank you for that.

Visuals

PowerPoint slides and presentations usually go hand in hand. However, it is important that you do not read off from your slides. Merely reading off from your slides shows your audience that you are ill-prepared and inexperienced, doing so will not hold their attention at all. Remember to include visuals like videos, colour, gifs, graphics and photos into your presentation to make it more appealing to the masses. Chunks of texts in your slides, bullet points and no visuals will come across as boring and can be hard for your audience to understand, much less remember.

Effective presentation skills are vital to human resource professionals, with these tips and tricks, you are one step closer to presenting like a pro. Good luck!