How To Put Together An Effective Training Presentation

With the rise of remote work and the digital transformation it has ushered, online presentations, webinars, and web conferences are becoming more and more of a norm. For trainers, this means it’s time to learn how to improve presentation skills.

Presentations come with their own set of challenges. As a trainer, it is important to ensure that you keep the audience engaged and interested in what you have to say.

See it from this perspective; Carol decides to attend a session at a conference because she wants to learn. She tells herself to leave the smartphone alone, take notes, and be engaged.

And then the presentation starts…

Slide after slide with too much text and worse, the presenter is reading them without any explanation or examples.

That’s when it happens… you pull out your smartphone and start checking email. Anything to keep her mind engaged.

Why do you think this occurred? Simple, the presentation was boring. The trainer failed to deliver an engaging presentation.

Keep reading to see how you as a professional trainer can deliver an impressive presentation;

Clearly Articulate Your Training Goals

Before you even begin planning the training day, identify your goals. Aim to make your goals as specific and concrete as possible, too. If you’re running a public speaking course, then one of your goals could be having each person in the course give a two-minute presentation at the end.

Make Your Training Memorable

When planning your training presentation, focus on making it memorable! Make the course fun for trainees by changing methods throughout the session.

Will anyone retain anything if you speak behind a podium with a PowerPoint for 3 hours? Of course not. Think of Carol’s situation in the story mentioned above, she chose to distract herself with her phone because the trainer’s presentation was boring.

Use the Perfect PowerPoint

A well-made PowerPoint can make or break your presentation. For a training session, use it to enhance your instructional activities. For optimal results, create an outline of your session before touching a single slide. You want your message to be clear before designing the presentation. You should also aim to keep it simple, with few or no animations, three to five bullets per slide, and one to two graphics per slide.

Keep your slides visually appealing and informative

Since you’ll be probably sharing your screen for most of the presentation, you need your slides to be visually pleasant. Use interesting or funny images to illustrate a point. Highlight specific information with your pointer as you go along.

Encourage audience interaction

Having a Q&A session at the end is great — but not enough. To keep your audience engaged so that they’re more than just passive listeners, encourage questions and conversation throughout. For example, whenever you finish a part of your presentation, pause and ask if there are questions.

Final thoughts

Keep these five top tips in mind for the next instructional session you plan. Whether it’s for your own company or you’re hired as a trainer for an external organization, these tips will be relevant for you.

What’s next for you? Looking to improve your training skills and be an effective trainer? Sign up for this Practical Training of Trainers course today!