Presentations in Assessment Centres
It is widely known that well developed presentation skills may influence your path to success in your career and life. Below we provide you with some hints and tips as how you may want to prepare for your business presentation to make impact and gain the respect of an audience.
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Build up a positive image before presentation
Before you are about to present try to recall an event associated with very strong positive emotions such as sense of achievement, for example, when you won something and bring to your mind rich picture and physical feelings of that experience. You are likely to feel much better presenting to your audience when you follow this technique because you will be in positive state of mind. Moreover, you can visualize desired event as though it had already happened. Our brain cannot tell the difference between actual experience and fictional event because all of the memories are stored in our brain in the same way. The richer the picture we imagine the more the brain is convinced that it is real. Try to build up an image of yourself that you present in front of the audience in confident and effective manner.
Don’t put every detail on presentation slides
Often, you may have a great deal of information that you will need to convey to the audience. Remember, in the assessment centre you will have only 10 or 15 minutes to conduct your presentation and it is important that you analyse your content closely before you present so that you only cover essential topics and engage your audience without feeling of being overwhelmed. Try not to put every detail onto your slides, use your slides for general points and then fill in the discussion with your speech around these points. Additionally, begin your presentation with introduction where you will outline the main topics that you will cover and conclude your speech with summary outlining what the audience should have learned.
Don’t read your speech from presentation notes
Do not read the speech from your notes but rather have some key words noted which will remind you the topic that you want to talk about. Centre your attention to audience and pay as little attention as possible to your notes. Connect with your audience and deliver your speech with lots of eye contact. As you will be delivering your presentation make direct eye contact with different people in the audience. For example, you may want to talk directly to one person for a few moments and then move on to talk to different person located in other parts of audience.
Don’t talk too fast and mind your body language
During your presentation make an effort to check your pace of speech as some people may naturally talk fast and rush through their presentation. If you are one of them slow down and make some little pauses in your speech. This will allow the audience to follow up with you and digest the information that you present. Additionally, use gestures and your body language to support your speech. For example, if you are talking about few different points hold up your fingers to illustrate these points. Remember, the body language is very important part of communication and is said to constitute over 50% of what we are communicating to the other person.