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Effective Presentation Skills are fast becoming one of the major factors in virtually any job. That said, there are still a lot of people who are unable to fulfill those requirements.

I decided to come up with a set of tips that might help people develop effective presentation skills. Here's my Top 5 Tips to help give a great presentation. In order to develop effective presentation skills you need to...

1) Know you subject. Sounds obvious, but bear with me. Everyone in your department may know the subject as well as you do, but that doesn't stop you from finding a unique spin on the topic. Instead of giving a dull, emotionless statistics why not try finding a vivid, imaged-filled comparison? For instance, instead of telling your listeners the distance between New York and Moscow you could tell them how many buicks would have to stretch end to end in order to cover that distance.

Also, what's the point that you're making with your presentation? you can't just talk continuously at length showing them slide upon slide of text until your time is up. Get clear on what message you want to convey to your listeners. Then everything that you say and show to them is connected to your main message, if it's not it's gone!

And please - don't clutter your slides up with mountains of text. Have clear succinct bullet points that encapsulate what it is you want to present. Then tell them the rest. You should be expanding upon the ideas in your bullet points and delivering them with all your panache, not just mindlessly reading them off the screen.

2) Structuring. Just like a good novel or film your presentation needs a beginning, a middle and an end. If it will help you can use the old reliable "tell *em format":

*tell *em what you*re going to tell *em, tell *em and tell *em what you told *em*.

Try your best to provide your listeners with new information or put a new interpretation on existing information. Remember, what you want to give them is great content not soulless spin!

3) Relevancy. Keep asking yourself is what your presenting relevant to your main message and relevant to your listeners? If it isn't then bin it and find something that is. I've been in the audience listening to a presenter asking myself: "how is this relevant to me?" And I never found out. I never found out because it wasn't relevant to me.

4) Enthusiasm. Try to let your enthusiasm for your material come through without being too over-the-top and evangelical. If you're not passionate and enthused by your topic why should we be?

5) Practise. Practise, practise and practise some more! You can't hope to develop effective presentation skills if you don't go over it before-hand. In order to nail it and win over your listeners you need to know the presentation better than the back of your hand. Make sure you know how the equipment works and what to do if there are any technical problems. Don't just rely on the temp who may or may not be able to help you out.

If you can implement these techniques then you will be on your way to developing effective communication skills!