How can you make your career development presentation actionable?

1 Define your purpose

Before you start planning your presentation, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. Do you want to get feedback, recognition, support, or collaboration from your audience? Do you want to persuade them to adopt a new idea, tool, or method that you have used or developed? Do you want to inspire them to pursue a similar career path or goal as you? Whatever your purpose is, make sure it is relevant, realistic, and valuable for your listeners.

3 Structure your presentation

Delivering your message clearly and effectively requires a well-structured presentation. A typical career development presentation should start with an introduction, where you introduce yourself, your topic, and your purpose. To capture the attention of your audience, you can use a hook such as a surprising fact, a relevant question, or a compelling story. Then, present the main points of your career development, such as your skills, achievements, challenges, and goals. Support your points with evidence, examples, and data. Use transitions, signposts, and summaries to guide your audience through your presentation. Finally, in the conclusion section summarize your main points and restate your purpose. Provide a call to action such as asking the audience to follow up with you or join a project or initiative that you are involved in.

5 Practice and rehearse

To make your career development presentation actionable, it is important to practice and rehearse it. Doing so will help you boost your confidence, fluency, and timing. Additionally, you can identify and fix any potential issues or errors in your presentation. You can record yourself to evaluate your voice, body language, eye contact, clarity, tone, pace and expression. Additionally, you can ask for feedback from a friend, colleague or mentor to evaluate your presentation based on purpose, audience, structure, content and visual aids. Furthermore, you can do a dry run in the actual venue or platform where you will deliver your presentation. This will help you test the equipment, lighting, sound and internet connection. You should also familiarize yourself with the space, layout and atmosphere in order to anticipate any possible distractions or interruptions. By following these tips you can make your career development presentation actionable and impactful so that you can showcase your career progress and potential as well as motivate and influence your audience to take action that benefits them and you.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?