At the beginning of my career, the idea of presenting anything to a group, no matter how small would terrify me. While I had full confidence in my technical skills, standing at the front of a room full of people, with all eyes in the room focused on me and (in my head) waiting for me to make a mistake would have been a nightmare. Now, I actually quite enjoy doing presentations and training sessions and welcome the chance to do them. In this article I’m going to go through what changed for me and hopefully how you too can learn to enjoy presenting.
Why presenting?
While presenting isn’t a core skill for software professionals and it’s certainly possible to go long periods (maybe even your entire career) without having to make a presentation, it’s definitely a useful skill to have. Being able to present a proposed solution to stake-holders in your business, or run a training course on a new technology you want to introduce increases your perceived value to your employer as well as making your more influential within the business. Promotions are likely to come more quickly and you’re more likely to get your way in technology discussions – If you’re arguing for technology X and a colleague is arguing for technology Y, adding ‘and I’d be happy to run a few training courses to get everyone up to speed’ is really going to add weight to your proposal.
Presenting as a realistic ambition
For me, the realisation that presenting was something that I could do and be good at came from observations gained while watching others present, and if you want to get into presenting, one of the best things you can do is start watching other people give presentations on technical topics. If you can arrange to go to an event where there will be presentations that’s a fantastic start. You could go to one of the big, multi-day software conventions, typically held in London and if you can manage that I would definitely recommend it – they offer great opportunities to improve yourself as a software professional far beyond learning to present, but there are also lots of smaller events dotted around the country that typically only last half a day, or an evening and have the benefit of being very low cost, or even free. To find events in your local area try talking to your colleagues or searching for local software user groups. Finally, if you cant find any events to attend in person, look for recorded events online. A lot of the larger developer events (and some of the smaller ones) post videos of their sessions and these are often free to view. While these don’t quite convey the same feeling as being in the room they’re still a great way to watch others present without having to travel.
My first realisation was that everyone makes mistakes. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done 1,000 presentations, you’re still going to have times where you do something wrong. Maybe you’ll mispronounce a word, or click the wrong button and the powerpoint slide advances before you’re ready (or worse, closes down entirely!). This happens to everyone, so why worry about it? Television newsreaders, who are paid (I assume) large amounts of money to read the news from a teleprompter every day sometimes get it wrong so no-one expects your presentation to go perfectly without a single stammer, mispronunciation or technical glitch, in fact it would probably be a little weird if it did. The important thing to do if you do make a mistake is keep calm, smile, correct the mistake and move on.
My second realisation was that no-one remembers the mistakes. The people in the room are there for the content of the presentation, not the mistakes, so if you don’t make a big deal out of them neither will they. If you make a mistake every 5 minutes, that’s over 4 minutes of good content to every error and the good content will persist in the audience’s minds. While your audience will probably notice the mistake at the time, straight after the presentation they might only remember some of those mistakes and two days later you will probably be the only one who can say if there were any mistakes at all, let alone what they were. So again, if you make a mistake, keep calm, smile, correct and move on, it’s a little embarrassing now but it’ll fade from people’s memories almost instantly.
My third realisation was that the presenters I was seeing were just like me. OK, some had more experience than me, or were in more senior positions (which might have come from their willingness to do presentations!), but deep down they were just people who worked in software and had something they wanted to share. They weren’t celebrities who had made a career out of being seen, they weren’t some kind of genetically engineered super-being with all human emotions, fears and neuroses designed out, they were just people, like me. So if they could do it, then so could I, and if I can do it, then so can you.
My fourth realisation was perhaps the most powerful, and the one that, for me, really helped turn something I dreaded, into something I relished. It was that in a room with a presenter and an audience, all the power lies with the presenter. For me this was ground-breaking – the presenter wasn’t some unfortunate prisoner being thrown to the lions, they were, in essence, the most important person in the room. Any of the audience might not have shown up but the presentation would have gone ahead, (although possibly if none of the audience had shown up there would be little point continuing), but the only single person who could cancel the presentation just because they didn’t feel like turning up was the presenter. When they got there, the presenter could have spoken about anything – their aches and pains, what they watched on TV last night, or the current fortunes of their favourite sports team. They could have put together a montage of their favourite cat videos, put it on the big screen and just said ‘watch this’ and no-one could have done anything about it. OK, in those situations the presenter was unlikely to to have been invited back, and there might have been some strong words exchanged after the event, but for the duration of the presentation, the presenter is in full and total control. And that’s a pretty cool position to be in.
Dos and Don’ts
So the four realisations I detailed in the previous section really helped turn my thinking around on the subject of giving presentations. The only other thing that I needed was confidence in the presentation that I would give. Obviously if you’re confident that you have a good presentation, it makes it much easier to be a confident presenter so lets have a look at a few quick dos and don’ts for presenting.
Do: Have visual aids
Visual aids make things more interesting for the audience, it keeps more of their senses activated and makes them more engaged in the presentation. They also mean that the audience’s focus is split between the visual aid and you, rather than being solely on you which is likely to make you feel more comfortable. In most cases, the visual aid will be a Powerpoint presentation, or similar, although there are more interesting alternatives available if you can find the time to learn them and set them up.
Do: Practice
Ideally in front of an audience, but if none can be found, just finding the time and space to stand up somewhere and run through your presentation can be really helpful. Bonus points if you can practice in the same room you’ll be giving the presentation but don’t worry if you can’t. Doing a dry-run of a presentation in a low pressure situation is helpful for a two reasons. It lets you find any problems in the presentation that should be addressed before the day – e.g. slides in the wrong order, or an inconsistency in what you were going to say. Often you can read through a presentation a dozen times, but still not notice a mistake until you’re reading it out loud . A dry-run also in making you more comfortable giving the presentation and when you’re doing it for real, you’ll be able to remember doing the practice run and knowing that you can get to the end!
Do: Prepare for questions
It’s common for a presenter to invite questions from the audience and many will say up front whether they prefer questions throughout the presentation as they occur to people or if they’d prefer for everyone to save them until the end. Some audience members don’t follow the rules though and you should be prepared for that happening, whether you intend to answer any questions asked out of turn, or remind the asked that you’ll answer all questions at the end of the presentation. Also make sure you know your subject well enough that you can answer questions about areas that haven’t been directly addressed in the presentation. It can be helpful to go through the presentation to see if if there are any obvious questions that arise from it, although it might be better to try to answer any questions you can predict as part of the presentation, rather than relying on someone to ask the right ones! Finally, don’t be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’. If you are asked a question you don’t have an immediate answer for, say so but offer to find the answer and get back to them when you’ve had a chance to look it up.
Don’t: Have wordy slides
The words in the presentation are going to come from you, so slides should be focused on imagery, whether that’s a picture, diagram or chart. Small amounts of text, including the name of the concept you’re currently explaining is fine but they really should be minimal. If you put up a slide with text, the audience are going to automatically read what’s on it. If this takes more than a second or two, they’re likely miss something you’re saying, which means that some of the content you’re trying to get across will be lost. Definitely don’t have text on the slide that you read out as part of the presentation. The audience will already have read the slide before you get to it and will be bored by the repetition. If you have something on the slide that you need to say out loud too at least word it differently to keep the audience interested.
Don’t: Rush
When doing something that makes you nervous, like presenting, there’s a tendency to want to ‘get it over with’ which can cause people to talk a little more quickly than they usually would. This needs to be avoided, as not only will it make you sound nervous, but in a potentially large room with poor acoustics and with a mixed audience who may not be familiar with your accent this can make you hard to understand and that will compromise your ability to get your content across. Also remember to pause regularly. Short pauses can give your audience time to process what you’ve told them, help emphasise certain statements and, most importantly, give you time to breath! In general, if you feel like you’re talking a little too slowly and pausing for slightly too long, you’re probably spot-on.
Don’t: Mistime the presentations
The only time I’ve ever seen a presentation go memorably wrong was due to a timing issue. In this case the timeslot for the presentation was 90 minutes, but the presenter ran out of material after 30. Although he made a valiant effort, no amount of ‘Are you sure there aren’t any more questions for me?’ was ever going to fill the remaining hour. So do try to work out how long your presentation will take and make sure it meets any timing requirements. Having too much material is better than too little but it might mean that you won’t be able to get everything you wanted to across, or you have to rush everything towards the end as your attendees keep checking their watches. The best way to find out how long a presentation will take is to have a stopwatch with you when practising and use it to time the presentation from beginning to end. Allow some time for questions but 5-10 minutes is usually plenty.
If you’re worried about timing on the day you can be more granular and time how long it takes you to do each slide (or each group of slides – you can decide how many slides makes a group) and on the day, have a clock visible so you can compare your current time to your practice time and see whether you need to speed up or slow down.
Hopefully this article has helped you see that presentations can be great for your career, and fun to do too, as well as covering a few hints and tips for preparing and giving your presentations. I think that anyone who can understand enough about a subject to explain it to others can give a successful presentation even if they don’t see themselves as an ‘in the spotlight’ kind of person. Remember that when you give a presentation, you’re the one in control and no-one can take that away from you!
