Giving Clear and Compelling Presentations on Technical Topics

This course is intended for professionals who deliver presentations or lead meetings. The aim of this course is to ensure that your message gets across to your audience.

During seminars and meetings, presenters tend to speak at the same pace as they think, and they advance their slides in concert. However, audience members lack the presenter’s level of context, so they require the presenter to deliver the information more slowly and in smaller chunks. This course will demonstrate how to ease your audience’s cognitive load when you are speaking about accounting and finance concepts.

The course will concentrate on presentations that involve visual aids, such as PowerPoint slides, diagrams, and charts. When presenters use visual aids, they frequently commit two critical mistakes, each of which forces the audience to engage in multitasking.

1. The first mistake is that presenters communicate orally at the same time as they are revealing written information. Studies show that audience members cannot consume both oral and written information in the same moment.

2. The second mistake is that presenters bring too much visual information onto a slide at once, causing audiences to peek ahead while also trying to absorb the current topic.

In this course, participants will learn how to avoid these two ubiquitous mistakes and, instead, develop a smooth presentation style. As a result, audiences will clearly understand your technical presentations and be compelled to follow along.

Who Should Attend
This course is for professionals who give presentations or lead meetings about technical topics.

Topics Covered

• The cognitive science behind delivering and absorbing information
• The illusion of multitasking
• PowerPoint tips for new and experienced users
• Allowing audiences to actually read your slides
• Progressive disclosure of information
• The challenges of presenting orally as compared to communicating in writing
• Subconscious techniques to ease absorption, such as alliteration, hiding of unnecessary details, and consistent ordering of information

Learning Objectives

• Use appropriate pacing when giving a presentation or leading a meeting
• Stagger your delivery of oral and written information
• Add only one point at a time to your PowerPoint slides
• Choose color schemes that help your audience focus on the key information
• Enlarge, shrink, and move objects or text
• Appreciate why audience members require a slower pace than presenters do, according to cognitive science

Level
Basic

Instructional Method
Group: Internet-based

NASBA Field of Study
Business Management & Organization (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
None

Advance Preparation
None