How to present a technical presentation
Recently, I had an opportunity to present my work to the department, and this was my first technical presentation. I thought why not take a note on what should be aware when doing a technical presentation and share my thoughts since most of us either stay in academic world or engineering field would likely to do a technical presentation.
During my preparation and actual presentation, I've noticed the following points are important, but if you have better hints or disagreements, I would like to hear!
1. How to dress
This might sound irrelevant to doing a good technical presentation at the first glance. However, this hint in fact matters a lot. How you dressed would leave a first impression to your audience and directly affect how much attention they will pay to your presentation. You would want to dress in formal so that audience will treat your presentation seriously!
2. Passion & Enthusiasm
To have a successful presentation, the key point is to attract your audiences throughout the whole presentation. Well, admit it, this is extremely difficult in technical presentation. The findings in your research project are usually not ground-breaking, but you are responsible to make it SOUND ground-breaking. Yes, that is right. If you are not even passionated about your project, how would you expect your audiences to listen your presentation carefully? Try to refresh on why you decided to pick this research topic, whether this comes from a strong belief in resulting a economic gain or just simply because this is a difficult problem people have been trying to try for a while. Then keep the passion and enthusiasm!
3. Avoid Technical Details
A lot of researchers or engineering professionals seems to focus too much on technical details when giving their presentations. To me, I personally think this is NOT NECESSARY. First, not all the audiences have the background knowledge to understand the details. Second, audiences are likely more interested in the results from your work other than how you obtain the results. Third, if audiences want to know the technical details, you can always direct them to a technical report instead. By not doing too much about technical details, you can better allocate time and effort into defining the problem and emphasizing your results, these two would add more value to your presentation in my opinion.
4. Keep engaging with your audiences
Unlike other presentations, the value of keeping engaging with audiences are extremely important. While other types of presentations, audiences can easily follow the presenter again after all sorts of distractions. In technical presentation, audiences would mostly likely give up listening once they get distracted by something or lost, because they are really LOST. Technical presentations tend to be complex, audiences usually need to stay focus all the time in order to understand the content. Here is what I did for my presentation, I stayed eye contact with everyone of them for the whole presentation, and once I noticed anyone of them felt lost, I stopped my presentation and asked if they had something that are not understandable. This helps a lot, since other people may also be confused, but you should clear it up without distorting your presentation orders. I also put some humour elements into my presentation, and added some very easy questions to ask audiences, this can give audiences breaks during the presentation since it is usually long...
5. Pictures, Charts, and etc
Well, your work may be very interesting and convincing, but text and talk just can't give out the same effect to audiences. "A picture worth thousands of words", and I would say that the quality and quantity of pictures in a presentation has a linear effect on the success of the presentation. While collecting data and creating a good picture are a lot of work, this is worth doing in technical presentation. For example, if you want to convince your audiences about the implication of your research results, a chart with actual data that depicts the trend is way more powerful than saying it in words 100 times!
6. Acceptance
This is perhaps to hardest to do in practice, and it happens quiet often. We are usually very confident with what we found, but one of the audience expresses doubts about the results. DO NOT deny the doubt immediately, listen carefully about the doubt, and ACCEPT that the possibility of wrong results. After this discussion, you should gain back control of the presentation and continue with your topic. If you choose to deny the doubt at the first place, you are actually contaminating your reputation just because things are really possible most of the time. In additions, you may be asked questions that outside of your knowledge during Q&A session, DO NOT make up an answer, simply reply that you do not have enough knowledge on the topic would land you in a better position.
7. Practice, practice, and practice
Technical presentation is hard, no kidding. There are so many terminologies for a specific area, what even worse is that not all your audiences are equipped with those "words", you need to find the balance that your audiences will be able to understand your talk as well as demonstrating your area of expertise. Practice is the only one way to achieve this objective. I also find that doing recording while practicing is very helpful, you can estimate how long it takes for the whole presentation, and find out where you can make future improvements about your presentation.
This is my two cents on how to present a technical presentation, and I always like to have advices so that I can perform better. If you are about to have your first technical presentation, I hope my advices can be useful to you. If you are an experts on this topic, please give me advices!!!
