Learning Paths: Improving Your Presentation Skills – O’Reilly

Creating and delivering good presentations is an essential business skill, and like any skill, it can be learned. Each bit of the process—framing your storyline, selecting graphics, using effective language, and knowing how to carry yourself in front of an audience—can be improved with expert advice and practice. If you need to present ideas and content often—both internally and externally to your company—and want to become a more influential speaker, this Learning Path will help you shine.

Below are the video training courses included in this Learning Path.

Be the BEST Bad Presenter Ever
Presented by Karen Hough 2 hours 17 minutes
Public speaking doesn’t need to be scary or awkward. In this course, former network engineering executive and stage actor Karen Hough uses wit and wisdom to show you how “being bad” at public speaking can really work. She’ll demonstrate how it’s the outdated rules about speaking that make us stiff and uncomfortable. Whether you’re in a one-on-one meeting or presenting formally, being yourself in an authentic and passionate way will always be better than following bad advice. Under Karen’s expert guidance, you’ll learn to toss out the old tried-and-true rules of presentation and transform yourself into a confident, authentic presenter.

Presentation Patterns
Presented by Neal Ford and Nathaniel Schutta 6 hours 58 minutes
You’re giving a talk on a subject you know inside and out and your audience is staring at their cell phones. In this fast-paced, humorous course, presentation pros Neal Ford and Nathaniel Schutta provide the help you need to keep your audience engaged. They’ve spent thousands of hours giving talks at seminars and have used this experience to deconstruct “The Presentation” into a set of patterns and anti-patterns. What are these? Simply a set of names (often funny ones) for the building blocks of good presentation practices (patterns) and the stumbling blocks of bad ones (anti-patterns). You’ll get concrete instruction in how to plan your presentation, handle a wide variety of presentation types, and deal with constraints and surprises. By the end of this course, you’ll know what to do to reach your audience, and perhaps more importantly, what not to.

Influencing People Honestly
Presented by Mark Levy 2 hours 24 minutes
The word “influence” rightfully smacks of manipulation. But what if you could influence others using communication strategies that were ethical and open? What if the strategies you used were so focused and fair that the very people you were trying to influence wanted you to use them? Those are the concepts you’ll explore in this course as you’ll learn how to influence others through considerate, principled means. You’ll learn how to listen instead of talking, to create “the story” about your idea that everyone wants to hear. You’ll get practice “framing,” a technique that frees people from preconceived notions and enables change and master techniques for rehearsing what you want to say. With these and other techniques from the course, you’ll feel confident in your ability to influence people honestly.