L&D R&D: 5 tips for teaching with slides

Every presentation has a purpose. Sales presentations focus on persuasion, keynotes inspire, and Learning & Development (L&D) presentations teach and share information. If you want your presentation to fulfill that purpose, it needs to be built around the specific audience for that content, and the unique needs of your content.

In other words, you can’t just change the topic and start with the same approach to all of them, you need to approach each presentation type with the right intent and attitude.

L&D presentations in particular require some small differences from other presentation types. With persuasive presentations, how the audience feels matters more than what they internalize; but with a presentation focused on communicating specific information, you need to make adjustments to remove any barriers between your audience and your ideas.

If you’re training a team, sharing out internal comms, or even giving an informative webinar, these small-but-mighty changes will help turn any L&D presentation into a master class.

Learning starts before class begins…

One of the best ways to prime an audience to learn is to introduce your ideas before the day of the presentation. A well-designed pre-read can help to set the stage for your story, giving the audience a chance to mentally prepare before having to listen and retain at the same time while the presentation is happening.

It can also help to boost engagement on presentation day. A brief prework assignment can ensure they’ve started thinking about the topic before the meeting starts, and it builds a bit of interactivity into your presentation, which is always a good thing.

But don’t overdo it! Don’t bog them down with information or create time-consuming work that will just leave them frustrated. Instead, build short and simple documents that start the ball rolling, and pick it up in your slides.

… and continues after it ends

After the sessions wrap-up, don’t just wave goodbye and hope the ideas stick. Remind the audience of the key messages with a brief follow-up document that recaps your content and summarizes the main points.

Similarly to the pre-read, the idea isn’t to send over the entire presentation (although you could), it’s to create another moment where the audience is engaging with your content. By summarizing rather than sending over the full deck, you reinforce the key ideas and make it easy for them to focus on your ideas, instead of (essentially) assigning them the work of reviewing your slides.

You can also create functional documents like worksheets or checklists that help the audience to put the content into practice. These can help to bridge the gap between ideas and implementation, and can give the sense that your content is considered and authentic.

With both pre- and post-reads, design matters. Your documents should look related to your presentation, and feel like thoughtful additions to your content rather than a Word doc copy and paste of the presentation. Little touches like this make a huge difference in how the audience assesses your materials.

Repeat yourself

When you’re conveying information in a presentation, you can’t expect your audience to take it all in at one time. Instead, you want to give them multiple ways to get your information, and lean on repetition as a tool to reinforce learning.

There’s an old saying in public speaking that applies to this idea: “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you’ve told them.” While you may not want to apply this directly to every presentation, it’s an idea that is particularly well-suited to L&D presentations.

Tell them what you’re going to tell them so that they are ready to hear your ideas, rather than reacting to them in real-time.

Tell them your ideas in a clear and concise way,?

Tell them what you’ve told them by recapping and summarizing your content.

By layering your message and creating multiple content touchpoints, you increase the amount of time that the audience spends engaged with your content, and build additional opportunities for that message to stick in their minds.

Simplify your slides

Concise slides are always better than busy, messy ones. And when you want an audience to retain an idea, that principle becomes doubly important.?

That’s why any L&D presentation should stick to just one idea per slide. That doesn’t mean one sentence or bullet point, it just means you need to stay focused on as specific a point as you can.

It also means that you might need to split up some complex content into multiple slides. But keep in mind that more slides doesn’t have to mean more time. You can still cover the same amount of content, you are just organizing it in a slightly different way.? (In fact, you should take this idea and apply it to all of your presentations!)

Say: Do: Time:

Once you start pulling together your L&D presentation, you might worry about how you can stay on track and get through all these slides without running out of time. Our solution is to build your timeline right into your slides!

When we train teams or host webinars, we build all of our speaker’s notes around the “Say: Do: Time:” method.

Say is just what it sounds like – this is your voiceover that you have written out in advance and read-through to test for time. (You did write it out and practice it beforehand, right?)

Do is the action you’ll take on that slide. It might be asking a question of the audience, pausing for participation, or reminding them of the time left in an exercise. On slides where you are just reading through content, you might not have anything in this section.

Time is a rough measure of how long you should spend on each slide. You might budget 1 minute for a simple content slide, and 5 minutes for a more complex infographic that you want to explain in detail. With an estimate in place, you can both plan out your timing for the entire presentation beforehand, and monitor your time as you go.?

This simple format gives the presenter lots of valuable information in a streamlined format, and it’s a must for keeping all the moving parts of an L&D presentation going at the same time.

Conclusion

Sharing information that’s clear and actionable is a challenge, but with a few simple changes you can make your L&D presentations more focused, more memorable, and more effective.

Engage your audience with pre- and post-read docs that set the stage and summarize the content.

Use repetition to reinforce main ideas.

Simplify your slides down to one idea each.

Plan your presentation with the “Say: Do: Time:” technique.

Did any of these tips resonate with you? What have you found to work well when creating L&D presentations? Tell us in the comments!

Want more tips and advice on better business communication? The presentation experts at VerdanaBold are here to help. We offer presentation design and storytelling services, corporate presentation training, and a huge library of free educational content that’s always being updated. Contact us to learn more about how better presentations can elevate your business communications!