My Networking

It’s been a while since I posted something, sorry about that, I am recently involved in many time-consuming projects :-) Anyway, this time I decided to make some notes regarding technical presenations and trainings. I have seen many types of different documents, I prepared few by myself, I attended miscelanous training and was a trainer myself, too, and believe me, I have seen a lot of nasty presentations :-) So, here are some of my thoughts on how to prepare good training material. I am not going to give you all details how to be a killer-presenter, as there have already been many books written on that subject, but I will mainly focus on the most important things I noticed people keep forgetting. Here we go (sequence is random):

• Create intro page with short, descriptive topic and your name and contact, presentations are often published, and it is hard to discuss them with an author if there is only his name, no email, no phone, no webpage

• Prepare short agenda, do not cover all subjects, only the main ones, you can extend main topics with sub-agendas, but later in the presentation, your main agenda should fit on one slide

• Use templates, make sure all your slides follow the same theme, try to be aesthetic, it shows how well you are organized, many presenters share huge knowledge, but their presentations are very awkward

• Use one font for all common texts across all slides, if you copy-paste something, apply your font, the slide looks realy nasty if half of text is Times New Roman and half is Arial, it’s not a marketing presentation, it’s supposed to be a technical one, so it must be easily readable

• Use Courier-New font for displaying device configurations, it’s just the best-practice, especialy for configurations that are cascaded, you know which part starts where

• Do not extend one main topic (if you do a whole-day training) over more than 40-50 minutes (number of slides depends on a content), no matter how interesting material you cover, people get seriously bored mentaly after 50 minues of listening (too much knowledge to absorb at once)

• End main topics with short summary, let people quickly refresh covered material, ask if there are questions, people sometimes are too shy or uncertain if they can ask questions

• Make sure the most important stuff is presented either as first or last, people mostly loose attention in the middle of presentation

• Do not exaggerate with content, but be quite descriptive, overloaded presentations make people read the whole content instead of listening to a presenter

• Make sure your slide title is separated from the content, leave some space so people know what this slide is about

• Do not use common language (refered as vernacular), your sentences should be short and precise, you are not talking to your friend in a pub, you are selling your knowledge

• After you finish your presentation read it twice, especialy when you add new slides from time to time, very often the same information is on two adjacent slides, only sencence is different, try to avoid doubling information

• If you don’t know how much time it will take to present the content (it often depends on peoples’ activity), add some additional slides at the end, you may refer to them if you finish too early, of course those slides must refer to the main subject of presentation

• It is nice to have some labs prepared in Dynamips (if possible), so you can enchance your presentations with some hands-on scenarios, even if you will be the only one configuring, it is a good time-filler

• If you want to add images, spend some time drawing your own, unless you want to refer to a specific chart or device image, believe me it looks really professional if all your network diagrams and flows are similiar, copy-pasted parts of jpgs look nasty, as they usualy come from different sources

• Do NOT read your presentation to the audience, the slide is to help you focus on the specific title, but you must describe what people see in your own words, it makes people sure you are a professional and know the topic

And now, two, the most important things to remember:

• If you prepare the presentation, make sure you understand the topic, do not copy-paste wise sentences which you will just read, people may ask questions, you should be able to answer at least in a basic form (if question refers to covered material)

• If you are asked a tricky question, be brave to say “I don’t know” if you really don’t know, say you will check and come back later with an answer, I have seen presenters struggling to answer the question by all means, and at the end they confused not only people but themselves too, it looks sooo unprofessional!

Final DONTs:

• Do not hold you hands in your pockets, you show no respect

• Do not swing, it looks like you want to pee

• Do not focus your eyes on one and always the same person

• Do not point at people to answer questions

• Do not stand in front of your presentation, step aside

• Do not hold a marker in your hand, blue hands look funny

• Do not laser point at people, surgery is expensive

And of course, check your zipper :-)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Miscelanous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.