Have you given a talk or maybe a handful, but struggled to come up with an enticing topic and engage audiences throughout it? Tired of giving the same boring technical presentation?
The first step is understanding what makes a boring technical presentation
Here are some of the elements of a boring technical presentation:
- Starting with an agenda instead of a story
- Creating slides that have too many words (more than five bullets and more than five words per bullet) and reading from those slides
- Using charts and graphs that people don’t understand within a few seconds and need to be explained
- Not explaining why this is important to the audience
- Not gauging the audience’s experience level with the subject matter
- Giving too much technical explanation in a short period of time instead of saving it for a longer workshop
- Memorizing the talk and sounding robotic
Sound familiar?
Turns out so have many students who considered themselves experienced technical presenter struggled to overcome one or many of these!
Why Experienced Speakers Need Help Transforming A Boring Technical Presentation
In the last couple of years of teaching the course, we’ve noticed a growing trend in the number of experienced speakers who participate in the course.
Wondering why someone who has some experience speaking needs a course like ours?
Turns out that even experienced speakers need a safe sandbox to practice! Plus most public speaking courses and books focus on providing general advice, but don’t do the following:
- Explain how to engage mixed audiences, which we often face when communicating with customers and nontechnical folks
- Teach you how to come up with topics and make them exciting and enticing
- Provide a safe sandbox to practice these skills over time and receive individualized feedback
Femgineer’s Confident Communicator Course does, and these were some of the reasons why Katy Kahla a software engineer, who had already taken a public speaking course in college and done some talks, decided to participate in our course in 2018.
In today’s video, you’ll learn from Katy:
- How the course helped her improve how she communicates with customers and non-technical people
- Why coming up with topics and making them engaging has become a cinch, even for something as dry as “testing software.”
- How she started to apply her learning to talks she was giving, even before completing the course!
Want help making your next technical presentation interesting?
Then check out Femgineer’s Confident Communicator Course by visiting our course page here.
