Five Tips for Improving Your Engineering Presentation

The following is a summary of Episode 57 of my podcast, The Engineering Career Coach (TECC) Podcast. I will summarize the main points in this post; however, you can also listen to the show through the website or by subscribing on iTunes. I offer a career-changing tip at the end of each podcast session.

In this session of The Engineering Career Coach (TECC) Podcast, I interview a dynamic speaker who has lectured at Harvard Medical School, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has performed an extremely successful TED talk, “Talk Nerdy to Me,” which has been watched by more than one million people (and counting).

“No one can remember more than three points.” ~ Philip Crosby

Melissa Marshall is on a mission to transform how engineers and scientists present their work. She believes that even the best engineering designs and science research is destined to remain undiscovered unless it’s presented in a clear and compelling way that sparks innovation and drives adoption.

In the Take Action Today segment at the end of the show, Melissa gives two actionable pieces of advice to help you with your content and your slides.

Listen to this session and learn from Melissa as she details these five tips on improving your speaking and presentation skills as an engineer:

1. Start with the end in mind – Think about where you want to end up at the end of your presentation and force yourself to articulate that in one single sentence and build your presentation around that theme.
2. Filter your PowerPoint slides – Use the Assertion Evidence slide design concept where you have a concise full sentence at the top of a slide and then a visual below it like drawings, charts, images, graphs, etc.
3. Use Notes pages in your PowerPoint file – Use the Notes pages in PowerPoint and put all the bullets there instead of on the slide. That way you can still provide people with a PDF of the notes pages of the PowerPoint file with all the bullets or information of your talk.
4. Use Presenter View on your laptop – Approach the talk with a more audience-centered viewpoint. When you use the presenter view on your laptop, you will not only see the slides that your audience is looking at, but you can also see the Notes pages for that slide which contain all your bulleted lists or reminders.
5. Don’t be afraid to blank the screen at times – If there is no visual, it is okay to not have a slide showing for every second of every your talk. By blanking the screen, people are actually going to focus more on you.

Do you already practice any of Melissa’s recommendations in your engineering presentations? 

Anthony Fasano, PE, author of Engineer Your Own Success, found success as an engineer at a very early age and now writes and podcasts to help other engineers do the same. Visit Anthony’s website at EngineeringCareerCoach.com to access all of the free engineering career resources he has created to help engineers succeed.