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If you struggle to create engagement or feel like you aren’t listened to, an upcoming IMechE training course could be for you. Focused on clear and concise communication, Presenting Technical Information (29-30 April) will give you rapid preparation tips and mental models to produce effective presentations, working with real-world examples to boost your confidence and make you more influential.
The course is led by Penny Taylor, an IMechE fellow and an experienced trainer, coach and facilitator with over 20 years of experience in the automotive industry. Here, she gives four key tips to help you effectively present technical information.
Make sure your written report and presentation have the same message
In my experience in industry, one of the big problems is that you go to a presentation, an engineer presents their project, and you think you understand the message – then you read the report, and it says something entirely different!
Sometimes they're different because people put a different emphasis on them. If you're presenting to the board you might focus on the business side, whereas if you're writing the report and it's going to the engineering director, you might focus on the technical side. Nobody gets your message if the two are not consistent, because everyone is confused.
Think of the verbal presentation as an executive summary
Don’t stand up with loads of tables, graphs, facts and figures – I want the key message in a short and succinct way. If you are asked to give a 10-minute presentation, it should only be the executive summary, with time for five or six slides.
When you see people launch into a presentation and it says “Slide 1 of 57” at the bottom, your heart just sinks because it is never going to work. It switches your audience off right at the beginning.
Focus on your audience
Engineers love data, but you need to consider if it is appropriate for your audience. The same goes for the language, the level of detail, the format, and timing. All those kinds of things depend on the kind of people that you're presenting to.
I always say to make it ‘one notch easier’. You want to make it that little bit easier for them, so they don't have to work at the peak of their intellectual capacity to understand what you're saying. Some engineers think that they're always presenting to people like them, who are just as fascinated in every single nut and bolt as they are. That's not the world that we live in.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!
This is the one that I stress in the course. Rehearsal means hearing yourself say it out loud, not just sitting there going over it in your head. It's only when the sentences come out of your mouth that you hear whether they make sense and flow, and how the timings are. Stand in front of the bathroom mirror and speak it out loud. People find it embarrassing, but there really is no substitute.
People spend an awful lot of time preparing PowerPoint slides that they're never going to use. Communicating efficiently means not wasting your time on things that don’t need to be done.
IMechE’s Presenting Technical Information course runs in London on 29-30 April. Find out more and book on the IMechE training page.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.