Powerful Presentations

Course Description:

Overview

• Effective presentation skills have become an essential professional competency for achieving key goals and influencing the decisions and actions of your audience. Yet many surveys place delivering presentations at or near the top of most feared activities. This course provides the skills and methods needed to comfortably plan, structure, and deliver business presentations for productive outcomes. Consider how to change your presentation for culturally diverse audiences, important stakeholders, and different delivery formats. Learn how to overcome internal inhibitors, such as nervousness, and mitigate external inhibitors, such as room layout, equipment, temperature, so that you can present with focus and confidence.

• Identify the objective of your presentation Plan your presentation type, theme, and contents by assessing audience needs and preferences Develop and deliver informational and persuasive presentations with authority, poise, and relevance Prepare to effectively handle the challenges associated with executive presentations Structure and deliver decision–making presentations to executive audiences

• IT professionals who need to present to stakeholders Business professionals who present to various decision makers: IT project managers, project managers, coordinators, business analysts, system analysts, IT project staff (developer and designer) Professionals who need to deliver business–outcome–based presentations Professionals transferring to a role in which they need to create and present presentations more often Professionals transitioning from an individual type of role to a team lead type of role Professionals who want to improve general presentation skills (work–related) Professionals who want to increase their confidence in presenting Professionals who don't get the results that they expect from presentations Professionals who don't know how to package all the elements together

• You are encouraged to bring your own topics to class, or you will be able to choose from several scenarios provided by the instructor. Though the focus of this class is not on developing presentations using software, we highly recommend that you bring a personal computer with presentation software such as Microsoft Powerpoint as some of your practical exercises will require the use of visuals. Please bring your cell phone or tablet to class to record the short presentations that you will be delivering, and your headphones or ear buds as you will be reviewing your recorded presentations during in–class exercises. Please ensure that you have sufficient memory space on your device to record a 3–5 minute video.