As communication consultants and trainers, we have noted an increasing significance of presentations skills training in both national and international organizations in the last 14 years. In this study, we wish to offer our audience with points to consider when giving their very own presentations, evaluating other presenters or providing training in this area.
We define a Presentation as a short (15-20 minutes), unidirectional communicative activity dealing more with concepts than excessive details and that goes from the presenter to the audience and should NOT involve direct questions/answers to or from the audience. This is often, and often is, followed closely by another activity known as a “Meeting with Slides” ;.
The standard “Meeting with Slides” is really a longer (40-120 minutes), more detail-focussed, omnidirectional, verbally participative Communicative Activity which some people mistakenly call a “presentation” and usually includes questions/answers from audience members to/or from the presenter and frequently involve an in depth analysis of financial data using templates.
Many trainers and presenters tend to mix the two elements togeth PPT Agentur Master Templates er into what they call a “a presentation” which will be often accountable for causing most of the problems identified in this study. We believe it is a lot more logical to provide a structured overview first and then, if necessary, enter the detailed analysis afterwards. Obviously, when the audience understand the global context and structure of the presentation, it’s much easier for them to understand the information and concentrate on the information in the given context.
The initial objective was to spot the main causes why audience members disconnect and stop attending to during presentations so that we could train our learners in probably the most appropriate ways in order to avoid these errors and provide a greatly increased communicative effectiveness to our clients. We defined “disconnection” as being when the individual stops listening; starts having parallel conversations (with the individual sitting beside them); starts checking emails; starts employing their laptop (or tablets) or some other activity that impedes them from playing close attention to this content of the presentation.
An initial study with users of OverHead Projectors (O.H.Ps) and pens was conducted between 1995 and 2000 mainly in Spain, France, Italy, USA, England with 1,200+ respondents. The presentations received in various languages. This study served as the cornerstone for the main one being presented here. The outcome from the initial study were just like those obtained in this one.
Respondents’ positions: From President, Managing Director, Senior Directors down seriously to employees in Sales, Marketing, R&D, Quality control, I.T., Technical posts, etc. Also included were other professionals such as for instance Doctors, Scientists, Lawyers, etc. In fact, anybody who must communicate effectively via presentations both within their very own organization or with external audiences.
The initial stage with this study involved having an individual exercise dealing with this topic on every Presentation Skills training course in both English and Spanish distributed by our organization. The trainees responses were noted on a flipchart and then investigated in-depth during the next feedback session where the outcome were prioritized so as of importance. The feedback notes from each course were then evaluated and put into the corpus of information. We then identified 31 key areas that appeared frequently in the responses obtained from our students and used them in the second stage with this study.
The second stage of the analysis contains the development of a bilingual survey (in English and Spanish) in both a paper-based format and for use on the web placing the 31 items identified as being causes for disconnection in a randomly ordered list. On the questionnaires, each statement was rated on a range from 1 to 10. #1 indicated Total Disagreement (absolutely NO annoyance / problems or disconnection) and #10 indicated Totally Agreement (great annoyance and immediate disconnection). Whenever possible, the questionnaire was followed-up by random structured interviews.