Presentation Skills Are Critical

The ability to stand up in front of a group of people and communicate effectively is a critical professional skill for program managers and other project leaders. It's particularly necessary for military engineers, defense contractors, and leaders in general. I can't say strongly enough how important this is as a matter of professional competence.

For better or worse, PowerPoint is the tool of choice for making presentations. When anyone gives a presentation with dense, complicated, unreadable, illegible and otherwise horrible-horrible-horrible presentation charts, they are demonstrating sheer professional incompetence.

In case you can't tell, I get kinda worked up about this.

For all the time we spend giving and receiving briefings, it's inconceivable to me that honing one's presentation technique is not treated as an important discipline and a core element of professional development. I've even seen professional educators, who brag about their ability to facilitate discussions and interact with audiences, use powerpoint charts that are frankly embarrassingly bad.

This stuff isn't hard. Sure, it's a little bit more work than doing it badly, but once you get the hang of it, it's not bad. Go check out Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen blog for some great examples of how to do it right.

Social Media Conference

I just spent two days at a "Social Media In Government" conference, sponsored by the Advanced Learning Institute. It was definitely an interesting time, but some presenters were much better than others.

Hillary Hartley, of NIC Inc definitely deserves a shout-out. Her presentation was fantastic and a real highlight of the two days. She demonstrated a most profound and comprehensive understanding of Web 2.0, Government 2.0 and social media, and did so in a language that everyone could easily understood. Plus, her slides rocked!

Which makes me wonder - for a group of professional communicators (and most of the presenters fit in that category), why oh why were so many of the slide presentations so crappy? I mean, in more than a few cases the person was a good speaker, the content was top-notch, and the actual slides were h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e (i.e. word-dense, bullet points, bland, etc).

And there was one presentation in particular, who shall remain nameless, who didn't belong at the conference at all. He was a fantastic storyteller with a gripping yarn to spin. I really enjoyed his bit. However, I cringed every time he said "social media" because he clearly doesn't know what that phrase means. What he meant was "online media," which isn't the same thing. Just because you post a podcast doesn't mean you're doing SM.