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Employee training

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I have been asked to give a presentation on security to my company’s employees and present the new network and email policies. I wrote the policies, but I am not good at presentations at all. I only have a week and a half to put this together. Does anyone have some pointers on delivering good presentations and how to lay it out. It should only be about 30 minutes, but that can be an eternity for the speaker.

Topic

Presentations

In reply to Employee training

There have been a couple of good ones (Powerpoint) here on e-mail security and the like, they can show you one method and format.

Join a toastmasters group

In reply to Presentations

For the future as it looks like you’ll give presentations. You may want to visit a toastmaster’s group in your area. You’ll get the opportunity to speak in front of a group and they will give you good feedback on your speach.

Preparation is Key

In reply to Employee training

Hey Greg, to make your presentation go smoothly, prepare a outline and print it out. You can even use that as a hand-out to give ’em all something to look at. It’s always a good idea to start off by doing a very brief over-view of what you are going to cover and ask everyone to hold off on their questions until the end (they can jot down their questions so they won’t forget). The reason for the latter is so your ‘flow’ is not interrupted and also because you may answer their question later on anyway in your presentation. Other than that, the best tip I can give is to try to give eye contact to some of the participants while you speak… focusing on different ones as you go (in-between looking at your notes, of course).

As far as the lay-out goes, I’d start with reasons why security is important and why everyone needs to be involved and aware.

I hope these pointers help and your presentation is a success and… for your sake, over quickly.

Good Luck from the Low Country to the Highlands.

Not Quite

In reply to Preparation is Key

The outline idea is good, but insufficient. You don’t want to put all of your content on the slides. The slides should be as brief as possible while mentioning the salient points you want to convey. The notion is that you don’t want your audience concentrating on reading the slides and not listening to what you have to say. Also, the less you put on a slide, the less tendency you’ll have to stare at it and read it to your audience.

IOW, you put enough on the slide to prompt you to say the right things and to help the audience follow along, but not so much that they don’t need to take notes.

As for asking folks to hold questions to the end, I don’t quite agree. While it is true that you can lose your train of thought due to a question, and a question can lead you off on a tangent, you also don’t want your audience confused throughout the rest of your presentation because something was unclear.

If your slides are complete but brief, you can easily regain your train of thought. If you don’t honor the question until you are finished with your current thought and are ready to entertain it, then you can’t get derailed easily. The only issue is to ensure that the question asked is germane to the presentation. If it is a good question, but beyond the scope of your presentation, then suggest addressing it after the presentation.

Slides? What Slides?

In reply to Not Quite

Slides? Neither Garym nor I mentioned slides. An outline is just a written list of topics, sub-topics and brief descriptions. The outline is not the presentation. It is just a synopsis of what will be covered (eg. a guideline).
I find slide presentations to generally be boring and very little is retained by the participants.
After doing public presentations for over 25 years, I’ve found keeping it short, interesting, informative and a slight bit entertaining works best. But I still believe that Preparation is the most important part of any presentation. In that the more you are comfortable with what you have prepared and organized, the smoother your presentation will be.
He has new policies to present. Focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ in a structured format that he is comfortable with should be sufficient.
Besides… let’s not indulge in overkill… after all it’s only a 30 minute presentation.

Overkill?

In reply to Slides? What Slides?

Perhaps there was no mention of slides, but they are usually implied. You may find slide presentations to be boring generally, but that isn’t because the presentation uses slides. Slides actually help to keep you and the audience synchronized. My tips in another post on what to put on the slides should keep them from being a problem to create or view.

As you might guess, I’ve had a lot of experience giving presentations, too. Your litany of “short, interesting, informative, and a slight bit entertaining” is not antithetical to using slides in the presentation.

The entertainment aspects must be weighed carefully for the audience.

Finally, a 30 minute presentation is a big deal to a newbie. The comfortable style of someone with great experience cannot be expected of one with no experience.

whatever

In reply to Overkill?

your misinterpreting what is suggested and what is originally asked along with your need to reply to respondents rather than to the inquirer make your two cents worth just that… 2?

Indeed

In reply to whatever

At the risk of merely satisfying my “need to reply to respondents rather than to the inquirer,” I’ll address your affront.

Your claim is that I misunderstood the OP and you didn’t. What hubris. Without further clarification from the OP, your interpretation is as valid as mine. Furthermore, my experience and sensibilities suggested the need to counter some of your claims to ensure the OP(!) got a balanced viewpoint. That is replying “to the inquirer.”

Your baseless ad hominem attack suggests that your cost analysis should have been directed toward your own reply rather than mine.

Hear Hear

In reply to Overkill?

I ditto CaptBilly.

I am so tired of people criticizing suggestions made by those who are trying to help rather than focusing on the issue at hand.

That is why I have not submitted any suggestions for a long time.

There is no room for over-sized egos in this forum.

IMHO
i hope it’s worth more than 2 cents 🙂

Astounding

In reply to Hear Hear

What hubris you have to assume that my replies were not in the interest of conveying the best information to the OP but rather to attach CaptBilly. Your reply and his are what lead to reduced input in a discussion.

You might instead try to assume the best of the posters. Could you have misread my post and intentions? You certainly did, so your reply and his were affrontive and troublesome. Whether I communicated to you my intentions well is another matter, but instead of being confrontational, you might have tried asking me for clarification.

I was nothing but civil in my reply. If you misread my reply to be anything else, them I’m sorry I didn’t communicate better.

Apology Accepted

In reply to Astounding

With his and my point further proven…
your apology is accepted.

😉

Wow, just read this post

In reply to Astounding

Interesting… the world would be less corrected, but better
off, if we had fewer “Ostintatious-know-it-all” posters.
=)

I doubt anyone will read this; however, if one does find
themselves in my shoes-a curious, information seeking
person, I hope they are as amused as I was, when they
find this tree. Stew, chill out!! We know you’re more gifted
than Steve Jobs, but just chill out. I hope your
presentations are not as imposing as your posts!

-Andrew
IT Security Administrator

Employee training

In reply to Employee training

Your job is to educate your audience. In order to accomplish that goal, you need to connect with them and keep it simple. A good way to connect is to have people introduce themselves and tell what they hope to get out of the presentation. Make sure to introduce yourself and thank people for coming. Do not use geek-speak. Keep the presentation at a level that makes sense to non-technical people. Since this is your first presentation, you should probably ask people to hold their questions to the end. Figuring on about five minutes for introductions and twenty minutes for your presentation, you should leave about five minutes for questions. BTW, you should figure on about ten slides to fill twenty minutes, but may want to have a few extra slides to pull out if necessary. Don’t have too much detail on the slides, but DO have notes on your copy.

You may want to have a token door prize. People love them and usually pay more attention if they know there is the possibility of winning something.

When you are done, thank them again for coming.

You’ll do great!

Craig Herberg
http://info-safety.com

Too Late

In reply to Employee training

By the time you’re in front of the audience to give a presentation, it is too late to learn what the audience expects to gain from it. Furthermore, if their expectations are divergent from yours, there’s little to nothing to be done about it.

A group large enough to warrant introductions is too large to ask to make them and a group small enough to make them feasible likely doesn’t need them. Strangers are nervous about introducing themselves when they expect to be anonymous in an audience and few, if any, of the others in the audience don’t care about the person giving the introduction. Consequently, I would not try the introduction idea.

The number of slides per given time really depends upon the amount of information conveyed for each. Only practicing will reveal how long is needed to deliver the content from a given number of slides.

The “10 o’clock news” style of presentation

In reply to Too Late

Whilst preparation is important, and there are many words of advice on how to present, I always use the 10 o’clock news method.

Watch any news bulletin on the tv, and they always do it the same way.

1. They tell you what they are going to tell you….

2. Then they tell you…

3. Finally, they tell you what they have told you.

Works every time!

Regards,

Good presentation

In reply to Employee training

I would do the following:
1) Get a slide frame that blends with your companys brand and color
2) Have an intro slide
3) Plan to make the presentation more functional and interesting by actually walking the audience through the policies by way of an example that is easy to comprehend.
4) Summarize the presentation by asking the audience questions that will reinterate the policies that were described in the walk through

How to Develop and Deliver a Good Presentation

In reply to Employee training

You can’t give a good presentation if you don’t know the material. You have to be sufficiently comfortable with the subject to be able to speak easily about it. If that means research, so be it.

You can’t give a useful presentation if you don’t address your audience’s needs. You need to know the skill and knowledge level of your audience so that you can adjust the content to match their needs. If your talk is too technical and the audience can’t deal with that, you’ll waste your time. If your audience is a bunch of geeks, then a high level, dumbed down presentation will bore them to tears.

If you don’t know enough about your audience now, learn. Interview some people that will be attending to find out what they know of the subject. Use a couple of people as guinea pigs. Try to explain the important concepts to them. If they’re confused, note what isn’t working and try something else. When you find what works for your guinea pigs, you should be ready for the wider audience.

You can’t give a good presentation if you’re boring. Some material is boring intrinsically, so it is up to you to make it less so. For example, when talking about security, give real examples of what phishing looks like and what the result can be. Make it personal. You must also talk to your audience. They are your coworkers, so talk to them like you would one on one. If there are some in the audience that intimidate you, then look just over their heads. People can’t tell when you’re looking at their eyes versus their hair, for example, when you’re reasonably far away.

You can’t give a good presentation if you’re uncomfortable. Your nervous habits will be a distraction to the audience. When standing still, curl your toes under to expend your nervous energy. Walk around before the audience. Moving will expend nervous energy. Try not to clasp your hands or pin them to your sides. You rarely act that way in normal conversation, so it will be a distraction. By practicing your presentation, you can eliminate the struggle to remember what you want to say and you can be comfortable with delivering the information so that you will be — and look! — less nervous.

It can be difficult to know how well you are doing from inside yourself. Thus, a good tactic is to videotape yourself when practicing. Review the tape and you’ll see yourself as others do. That can help you identify nervous habits and even notice delivery or content problems. Once you have experience giving presentations, many of these things will become second nature. You won’t have to work so hard. You’ll even get to the point where you can speak well extemporaneously. For now, however, practice will be your best ally.

As for the content of your presentation, there is an old saw about the organization of it: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. IOW, use a slide or two to introduce the scope and outline of the presentation, deliver the content, and then summarize the content by highlighting the most important points.

Some Suggestions

In reply to Employee training

Some suggestions.

At the start, ask a question (or two) of your audience at the start. Something that they can respond to by raising or not raising their hands. I would suggest something like “Who understands why we are implementing a new security policy?” [This one will likely result in almost no one raising his hand – don’t worry if no one responds.]

Provide an overview of why the new security policies were created. A main part of your presentation should be convincing the audience to follow the new rules. Reference some published statistics and, perhaps, some applicable recent headlines.

Cover only the most important or most controversial new policies. Provide the full policy as a hand out or provide a web link if it is online. Cover only 2 – 3 items, giving a one line description of each and the rationale behind the policy.

Discuss any monitoring that might be implemented as part of the policy. If there is no monitoring, state that as well.

Discuss any penalties that might arise as a consequence of violations. If there are not any penalties, state that as well.

Summarize the reasons behind the policy. This will involve repeating what was in the introduction, but should not be verbatim.

Have a question and answers session at the end. A slide with “Questions?” on it will not provoke any discussion. Ask some leading questions. “Is anyone unsure why we are putting these policies in place?” “Does anyone question the value of any of these policies?” “Will everyone feel comfortable following all of these policies?” If you feel uncomfortable responding to any questions, ask your boss to be prepared to handle any questions or even ask him to stand up and lead the Q&A section.

Using an approach like the above will make it quite easy to fill 30 minutes and will even get most of a technical and business audience to pay attention to a security presentation.

The heart of the problem

In reply to Employee training

Best thing I ever did to work on my public speaking was to attend some sessions offered by a representative of Speaking Circles. Their approach: put your entire priority into being with one listener at any given time. This requires that you do nothing at all, but breathe. The founder of Speaking Circles, Lee Glickstein, has a book out titled, “Be Heard Now.” It’s about being your real self in front of a group.
http://www.speakingcircles.com/

Know the material but don’t be bound to your foils

In reply to Employee training

It’s important to know the material intimately well. Then, when you present (I assume you’re using PowerPoint) DON’T repeat DON’T read the slides. Your audience can do that. Instead, embellish, add to and supplement what’s on the slides. Pictures/images are more effective than words.

Also, don’t look back at the screen. Try to position things so that your computer is between you and the audience, and that your laptop is set for dual display (computer and LCD projector). That way you can look at the presentation while maintaining eye contact with the audience. Look at the audience, but NOT at their eyes. Look at the bridge of their noses, so you’re not distracted.

Totally Agree

In reply to Know the material but don’t be bound to your foils

The worst presentations I have suffered through occured when the presenter read each word from each line from each slide. First, it is an indication that the presenter is not that knowledgible about the topic, and second, it intimates that we, the audience, cannot read. Its best to talk about the slides but not read from them. There are few exceptions to this but most times you will succeed by talking about the slides.

Tips of the trade

In reply to Employee training

Greg, I’ve been an instructor for quite a while now, so here’s what I’ve found:

1) Be Conversational. Talk to your class, don’t talk at them. Make sure to look them in the eye and try to be relaxed and easy going

2) Be Confident. Don’t let them see you sweat. This doesn’t mean you can’t be wrong or that you can’t answer questions, but it does mean that you need to show them you know what you are talking about.

3) Be Organized. Make sure you go in there with a good structure. I recommend having an introduction, a break down of topics by subject/server/SOP/whatever, and a strong summary. Make sure at the end of each topic you provide a summary.

4) Be Active! Give THEM stuff to do. Let the class do stuff, don’t be the sage on the stage, let the class learn by doing as well as by listening.

Hope that helps…

One Approach

In reply to Employee training

Hi Greg,
Daunting at first perhaps but remember, you have been asked to deliver this presentation because you are recognised by whoever asked you as the subject matter expert. Look at it as sharing your knowledge, rather than “school teaching”.

Important steps – one approach:

Know your subject matter inside out – do not stray off your knowledge base.

Map out what you want to cover and develop a logical structure to deliver it.

Develop your slides to model this structure. Do NOT subject your audience to “Death by Powerpoint”!

My rough guide 3 minutes per content slide, so for 30 minutes try not to exceed 10 slides.

No more than 4 points per slide. Use a font size that can be read at the back of the room.

A picture or diagram is worth 1000 words.

Tell them what you are going to tell them (Agenda), Tell them (Body), Tell them what you told them (Summary).

Don’t read out your slides – they are there to reinforce the structure of what you are saying, not provide the script!

Spell check everything – twice!

Some people find it helpful to write a full script while developing the presentation, others find it more natural to “wing it”, or something in between. But if you do write a script, learn it, don’t read it.

Practice running through the presentation in real time until you get a consistent delivery. If possible, get your partner, trusted colleague or the person who asked you to do it to listen to a polished run through – it will only take half an hour of their time.

Engage with the audience – talk to them, not at them or the ceiling, floor or back wall.

Take questions as you go along if an audience member cannot get beyond a particular point but if a simple short explanation doesn’t help, reserve the right to defer the question till the end of the presentation (and have someone in the audience make a note of anything you defer so you don’t forget).

I someone asks a question you will cover later, the stock answer is “Great question – I’ll be covering that in a few minutes.”

Make sure you can see a clock while you are presenting, the adrenalin can warp time. Some people find it helpful to hide a discreet progress marker on the half way point slide so you know you are roughly on track but don’t panic if you are off slightly.

For something as important as security policies, you will need to give your audience a handout to take away. Whether you hand this out at the beginning or the end is up to you. If you hand it out at the beginning, your audience can make notes as you move along but the downside is they may read ahead and not listen to you properly.

Be confident – as I said at the beginning, you are the subject matter expert.

Finally and easier said than done, have fun.

Good luck!

One Other Thought on Questions

In reply to One Approach

Your post reminded me of one other point WRT questions: say you don’t know when you don’t. Don’t try to make up an answer. Simply say you don’t know but will find the answer for them later. If you can, send an e-mail with the answer to all attendees, after the meeting, rather than sending it to just the questioner in case anyone else wanted to know.

Be visual

In reply to Employee training

Try and be as visual as possible and do not include too much text. You should do the talking, the pictures should say the rest and also help you illustrate your points.

At the beginning, give an overview of what you will be going through. At the end, summarise your main points.

Hints on Presentations

In reply to Employee training

First, if you are not at ease with public speaking you will probably not fix that in the week before your presentation; besides, we all have buterflies in the stomach. I knew a past president of Toastmasters International who said “We all have butterflies in the stomach; our task is to make them fly in formation.”

Hint 1: follow the prescribed guidelines for slideshows – 3-4 lines per slide and no more than 10 words per line; also make sure the font is large enough so that people can read it in the back of the room; if there is too much stuff on the slide (too busy), people will get confused; they will be too busy trying to read every word and will not listen to you.

Hint 2: When you are organizing the presentation, start by writing out your presentation – yes, the whole thing! – before you do anything else. This will do two things for you: 1) it will get all your thoughts on paper (or electron), and 2) you will have a basis for creating the slides and dividing the presentation into logical themes.

Hint 3: most successful outlines are divided into three sections: opening, body, and closing and the time allocations would be 20%, 60%, and 20%. For this, I might suggest the outline theme to be as follows: Opening – tell them what you are going to say (this will draw in the audience; you can use the theme of how and why the policies were developed but also give them a short introduction); Body – what works best is to present 3-4 key thoughts; if there are more than 4 policies, you might think about dividing into two or more presentations and focus on a group of 3-4 policies in each presentation – try to stay as simple as possible under the circumstances; Closing – this is where you leave the audience with something to take with them and in this type of presentation I would suggest that you summarize what you just told them; some of this will be a reiteration of the opening but it will drive home the idea of what you want to say.

After you write out the presentation, you can cut and prune for time and to insure that you are covering the areas you want. Go through the cleaned up version and start pulling out the salient points (such as the names of the Policies); these will become the main bullets for the slides. The rest of the text will be the filler you use during the presentation.

BTW: If you are going to do this more than once or you will be doing more presentations, I suggest you join Toastmasters International (check the .org site for a chapter near your location); I have found that my presentations for work went from boring (ineffective) to effective – not overnight but over several months.

Good luck.

Keep it simple and use humor

In reply to Employee training

You’re presenting to adults – they hate lectures. So instead, use some fun “bad examples”. Make sure everyone in your audience can see them.

Early on have a few bullet points that have the FEW main points. Summarize again towards the end.

A big trend in our organization is to give some ‘prizes’ out during the presentation. Ask a question “what % of network breakdowns are caused accidentally within the organization?”. They get a Dairy Queen certificate or a free vendor pen or something that’s been laying around. That will also help you since you seem to dread “30 minutes”.

one more suggestion

In reply to Employee training

There are some very good suggestions within this thread regarding presentations in general (overall approach, organization of the material, public speaking behaviors. I’ve got one more that I find to be very effective – whenever I’ve had to give presentations on new policies/procedures that folks were expected to understand and comply with, I always try to work in how it is beneficial to them personally. So speaking to how the new network and email policies will benefit the company as a whole as well as them individually will get your audience more engaged with what you’re saying and encourage a more positive reaction from them overall.

Finally, here a link to the Powerpoint presentation tip articles on BNET that may include some other ideas regarding layout, etc.: http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/download.aspx?&compid=20441&docid=259013&promo=713&tag=nl.e713

Best of luck!

Organize and Prepare

In reply to Employee training

Two comments… First, a key to any presentation (oral or written) is the 3-step process. (1) Tell them what you’ll tell them. (2) Tell them. (3) Tell them what you told them. Following this will keep the presentation a little crisper and the flow a little easier.

Second, be prepared. While some other comments to this question have downplayed the role of Powerpoint and the use of slides, I find that PPT helps facilitate the presentation and helps organize all of the preparation that goes into the work. PPT slides do not have to be boring. If you see a boring PPT, it simply means the presented did not KNOW Powerpoint fully or didn’t CARE to improve his/her sldies.

Know your audience

In reply to Organize and Prepare

The number one thing to do is know your audience. Know their concerns, and why they would care. Following security standards “because I said so” doesn’t really endear you to the audience. However, following security standards will prevent your or the companies bank-account from being emptied from a Nigerian guy, now you are relating to them.

Relate to your audience during the presentation. Then take the advice given above.

Nice But Racist

In reply to Know your audience

Hi Smith,

Your comment is nice but revealing your racial bias,and this is grossly unethical for an enlightened person like you.You probably have got racial issues you need to sort out.

Probably Not Racist

In reply to Nice But Racist

I’ve seen many a spam message trying to get me to reply to someone from Nigeria who needed me to set up a scheme for laundering money. I don’t know why Nigeria was selected for those messages but I can hardly recall getting any purporting to be from anywhere else. Whether ksmith could have used a more generic example doesn’t mean his referring to a common example makes him a racist. Instead, it draws on what is likely a common experience of the audience, just as he was suggesting the OP should do in his presentation.

I disagree completely

In reply to Nice But Racist

I have gone to great lengths to understand why I have issues in trying to present security requirements to Indian audiences. In order to gain better understanding, I took the step of attending workshops on Indian culture and having discussions with Indian co-workers. What I was able to learn has taught me how to communicate effectively with Indian co-workers about security issues.

How is recognising that there are cultural breakdown points racist? Am I a racist for not only recognising this simple fact, but acting to overcome it?

If you don’t speak good English and I insist on not providing an interpreter, who is in the wrong? If you don’t speak good English and I DO insist on providing an interpreter, does that make me racist?

I find you grossly unethical for playing that particular card unnecessarily.

You’ve just made another point…. social engineering

In reply to I disagree completely

Fear of the race card being played can be a social engineering weakness that may be employed to circumvent security.

To think ‘black hat’ for a moment…

If I were ‘black hat’ I could think of no better way to exploit that social engineering weak point by making sure anyone I used was of a minority group. I would then instruct them that before they did any infiltration, to make charges of racism against the target, then test how carefully security examined them after that.

If they were given a wide berth after that point, I would green-light them.

Of course, I am not black hat. This is, however a very real security vulnerability that I think should be examined carefully.

Filling 30 minutes

In reply to Employee training

Greg, the suggestions above are great, especially to rehearse at least once in front of a coworker. I’ve been doing IT presentations and trainings for years and unless you are being paid to specifically fill the time rather than get your point across, there’s no need to focus on filling those 30 minutes. If you can introduce your subject, hammer home the main points (and get buy in), summarize and take questions all in 20 minutes, great. Give the rest of the time back to them as a gift.

Make it real…

In reply to Employee training

Sometimes, nothing says it better than a real life example. Perhaps, you may want to set up couple of PC’s as part of your presentation whereas one is someone’s desktop computer and the other is the notorious “hacker”. Then, demonstrate to the audience the things that can happen which exemplifies the security points you are trying to make. In other words, make your presentation meaningful. Anyone can spew out facts and stats and include some nifty slides to boot, but to really hit home, people need to see the real effects. Cases in point, well, there’s Katrina, 911, Columbine, and VA Tech, and who knows what’s next. We need to see it before we believe it can exist and do something to prevent this from occurring in the first place. So, show them!

Thanks for the advice

In reply to Employee training

Now we’ll see how it goes.

training was a success

In reply to Thanks for the advice

I delivered a 30 minute presentation of best user security practices and then introduced our security policy. It actually went really well, had lots of questions, and was complimented by upper management and users who felt they gained some good advice. There have not been any complaints yet about the policy, but we will see about that. I wrote it and with uppper management went through it line for line.

Congrats!

In reply to training was a success

Glad to hear it went so well!
Now you’re an expert. 😉

Congratulations! Care to Share What Went Well?

In reply to training was a success

Congratulations! I’m happy to hear that the presentation went well.

I’m always curious to hear the experience of others. Would you be willing to list the things that went well with the presentation? And, hey, it’s always fun to relive a good experience with others, why not share it?

Thanks,
Wayne

first off..

In reply to Congratulations! Care to Share What Went Well?

I didn’t choke (that’s the best).
Everyone was very receptive to the information I was covering.
I chose to answer questions during, and there were a lot so I feel everyone understood after receiving any explanations they needed.
They didn’t complain about the policy.
I was able to answer all questions they did ask.
I was complimented by upper management after.
Many employees came to ask questions and talk about their experiences after the presentation, and it seemed they really related to the material.

I am no expert on presenting, but next time I will not worry so much and will be comfortable.

Cheers!

In reply to first off..

good work sir!~

Cheers!

In reply to first off..

good work sir!~

Tips on presentation

In reply to Employee training

1. Introduction to the session
2. Set the objectives of the session in point form
3. Make sure the idea flow from overview to details
3. Practice if possible 6 X 6 per slide (6 lines , each line having 6 words)
4. Use diagram if possible
5. AVOID JARGONS & ABBREVIATION very very important. Do not assume that audience know what they are.

Hope that helps.

Hmmmmmm I hate you already.

In reply to Employee training

Noo you can’t do it, your a sniveling ungrateful whiner with a bad attitude.

Leaning on others stupid enough to take up your own responsibilities for you, simply proves it.

Apparently you don’t belong here

In reply to Hmmmmmm I hate you already.

Techrepublic is for debating ideas, helping others in the field solve problems, and passing on advice to help others. I didn’t have someone create the presentation, just got tips from others more experienced. You should just go somewhere else.

Don’t mind the troll

In reply to Apparently you don’t belong here

He’s been firing off seagull posts in a few threads.

He’s just trying to get attention.

Presentation

In reply to Employee training

You can organize your slide peresentation in the following order
1. Title of the presentation
2. Highlights in form of bullets what you will present
3. Tackle each point on its own
NB.
Slide should be in summary.
Incorporate Grapics.
The presentation should have a theme.
If you are interested with a sample of a presentation email me on kimanimike2002@yahoo.com
Slides should not be so many.

Everyone needs help sometime….

In reply to Employee training

Some of the replies you received are interesting, especially those who condem you for asking for help. I feel sorry for those people, for they will never excel to their best. Now, to your question. I have been in the computer industry for over 40 years, and have taught everything from general software to A+ Certifications. Years ago, I too was scared to stand in front of an audience, and reached out to a group called Toastmasters International. These groups are some of the finest people, who are in the same boat – they have or have had a fear of speaking in public. They allow you to grow at your own pace, helping you along the way, without condemnation or intimidation. Sixty percent of the public has a fear of speaking in the public. Specifically to your question: 1) Make sure you know your material. 2) Be in the presentation room at least 1/2 hour before you begin to make sure everything is ready and have time to relax. 3) Remind yourself that you are in charge, and rather than think of your own fear, concentrate on welcoming others and make them feel comfortable – introducing yourself and making small talk as they arrive. Put yourself in the driver’s seat! 4) Know that if something can go wrong, it probably will, but take it in stride and don’t get upset; these things happen. 5) And last, but not least, don’t pay attention to those replies putting you down – truth is, they probably need help themselves, but don’t have the nerve to ask for it. Good Luck!

Training Presentation

In reply to Employee training

Create in jot note format the jest of what you want to say. Create a paragraph for each topic and time each one until you have filled up 30 minutes. Six points with 5 minutes on each one fills the spot. Now practice each point three times and you will be relaxed and do a great job! BELIEVE IN YOURSELF!!!

Corporate Presentation Assistance

In reply to Employee training

Hi! I just recently read your post – and I have a solution for the future. A company I recently started working for, Better Business Presentations, understands the importance of an influential presentation. With an expertise in both PowerPoint and Flash, we create visually stunning presentations that can meet any goal – from product proposals to employee training. Our president Bob Lipp, a former public speaking professor, would be happy to discuss his experience and knowledge of effective presentations. The link to our website is:

http://www.betterbusinesspresentations.com

Please feel free to email Bob Lipp (blipp@marcommgroup.com), or myself (kamendola@marcommgroup.com), with any feedback you might have!

Deleted – posted by mistake

In reply to Employee training

Deleted.

Ummm. One more thing

In reply to Employee training

force your self NOT to utter the word(?) ‘umm..’ between sentences or at any time.

This is one of the most irritating things speakers can do, especially if they do it out of control. I attended a webinar where one of the speakers was doing this. I wanted to reach my fist thru the internet and…

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