Presenting with ease

3 Tips on how to improve your presentation skills

Whether it is an oral final exam, a pitch at work, or even a job interview, we are always in need of our presentation skills. This makes it all the more important to consciously enhance them and keep challenging yourself. In this article, we would like to share with you 3 tips that will strengthen your presentation skills

Tip 1: Know all the relevant details of your audience.

The presentation should be tailored to your audience. Accordingly, you should know exactly the interests and needs of your audience. You will then choose the content of your presentation based on this information. Give your audience a reason to care, and thus provide a content worth sharing.

Tip 2: Structure the content convincingly

After you have become aware of your content and focus, it is important to come up with a clear structure at an early stage. Three essential parts should be considered:

Introduction

The introduction is very important and ultimately decisive for whether you can win the attention of the audience or not. Therefore, it is usually useful to create an emotional connection in the form of a story, an interesting question or an exciting statistic.

Main part

For the main part, it is beneficial to focus on the three most relevant points (or even more). In doing so, it is important that you know these points and the outcome you want to achieve with them. The emphasis here is on knowing, not memorizing. The audience notices immediately if you have memorized the content and tends to stop listening.

Conclusion

Remember, the conclusion is your last chance to convey a message to your audience that will stick in their minds. Therefore, briefly summarize the key message of your presentation in this wrap-up. In doing so, you should ask yourself the question: What do I want my audience to take with them from this presentation?

Tip 3: Practice the presentation

The last tip sounds very basic, but it is very important. Many tend to write down the information as a text and then memorize it. In the previous tip, we already mentioned one reason why you should not do that. Another tip would be to manage your nervousness. Depending on how nervous you can get, you may risk blacking out and losing the point of your presentation. If, on the other hand, you have your main points and key statements in mind, you can always spontaneously rephrase them in different wordings. Therefore our advice: Practice your presentation. Speak in front of the mirror or ask a family member or friend if they could listen to you. Practicing out loud and keeping track of time will help you look more confident on the day of the actual presentation.

If you take these tips into account, you will notice that presenting in front of other people will be much easier for you. And the more often you present, the easier it will be to develop a content concept.