The Mysteries Of Consciousness

I have seen many “presentation skills” courses arranged by large product centric corporates to assist their staff in gaining the skills and experience necessary to portray an offering in a compelling way. I have unfortunately not seen too many of these sessions bear any real fruit. If one take a few steps back, two intertwined reasons behind the ineffectiveness of these sessions become clear.
Firstly most of these sessions are facilitated by an external resource using material that bear no relation to the company and only covers the skills of putting together and presenting an effective message, not their message. But surely this should not hamper the success , the skill is surely transferable ? This gets us to the second portion, in most large corporates presentations are not prepared by the presenter, they are produced by a marketing or product department. Departments that rarely deliver the presentations themselves, they are tasked to create the presentations according to the standard corporate template and distribute to the rest of the individuals for actual delivery. Now we end up with a person that attends a presentation skills session, learning all the goodness of what the structure of a good presentation should be, only to land in the position where they have to attempt applying these skills to a sometimes poorly (actually this should say mostly, but we do not want to be rude)  constructed presentation.

So what would the solution be to this problem ? Simple, concentrate educational sessions on the individuals that create the presentations, not the individuals that inherit them for delivery. Both the creators and the presenters would be the ultimate goal but if you have to choose, choose the creator. The same applies to books on the subject, buy one for the original presentation authors before you spend money supplying the individual presenters.

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Hein Presentations education, marketing, Presentation Skills, product management