I am running a presentation skills course this week and looking for subjects to get delegates to do short, snappy presentations on throughout the day. Not sure whether 30 or 60 seconds is the best length. any suggestions?
Vivienne Holmes
Menu
Menu
4 Responses
Presentation Skills
I have just run a series of presentation skills courses. I asked the delegates to come up with their own subjects as that way they would know the subject matter. I did run one exercise where I presented them with a mystery object (mostly my childrens toys) and got them to speak unscripted for 1 minute. This was more by way of an enervator for the after lunch session but did get them to think on their feet. As far as length of presentation was concerned I started them with a to minute one which they should have pre prepaired but often did not and to finish a ten minute one. I felt antything shorter would not give me enough to feed back on. Most had no problems with this.
Presentation
I have trained this course for many years and for what it’s worth, I think you are not giving them long enough. It will take them a minute to introduce themselves.
I generally allow them to choose any subject to present in (as this compounds the rule that you should know your subject inside out) and allow them 5-10 mins.
I also let them use the IT suite to design thier presentation on Powerpoint. If you don’t have this facility, then you could provide, flip chart, overheads and pens.
PS. the brief as I said is any subject – provided it is legal and not offensive!
Good luck, if you want to know more you can mail me ginny.haynes@scci.org.uk
Snappy presentations
Yes, i am going to get them to do an introducer presentation and all the usual stuff, i just thought that short snappy presentations throughout the day would keep up the pace of the course and give them an extra chance to practice non-threatening fun speaking.
Short and to the point
Sticking with your original idea and building on something we used in an old presentation skills course we developed, I would suggest the following…maybe as warm-up to something else.
Ask each participant to prepare a one minute presentation on a subject of their choosing. If you try to give them a new topic, then they may spend a good deal of the time “umming and ahring”.
Give them five minutes to prepare, but two minutes before the end of the preparation time, announce that there’s been a change of plan…they now only have 30 seconds to speak!
We used a similar exercise to introduce the need to stick to the basics and tie the content closely to the presentation objectives. It helps to focus the mind and cut out redundancy.