Effective Presentations Course: How to Choose the Best for You or Your Company

Enough with boring presentations!  

How many of these have passed before your eyes, lately?  

We all know that a boring presentation will be ineffective and won’t get the message across, which implies communication failure and, often, the sacrifice of an idea.  

How so, Maurizio?  

You see, if you’re presenting, it’s because you need to convey your thoughts, your ideas to the audience. Often, the message you want to pass is important, and for this reason you need a moment of attention.  

If you present poorly, you won’t get the attention you deserve, and your message won’t get through. 

I’m describing an everyday reality in the business world.  

Does this apply in corporate environments as well? 

Of course! 

Endless boardroom meetings or video conferences with endless and dramatically soporific presentations.  

Recycled presentations and updates of old, tired presentations.  

Not to mention those simply lethal number-crunching presentations! 

An honorable mention goes also to that poor and mistreated corporate template, often used improperly with poor or bad results both from a communicative effectiveness and a processing efficiency point of view. 

There is good news, though.  

If you’re reading this article, it means you’re already ahead of many others. 

Why, Maurizio?  

Simple – you’ve noticed the problem, and now you’re looking for a solution.  

Maybe it’s for you or your company, but you’re the change agent that’s going to evolve the way presentations are designed and delivered around you.  

In short, it’s time for your effective presentations course.  

Eyes open though, because we’re talking about a very unique skill that sits at the intersection of design, communication strategy, storytelling for business, technical proficiency on PowerPoint, and the ability to create and understand content.  

I believe that paginating a presentation just to make it prettier and make it more pleasing to the eye serves no purpose.  

Embellishing slides does not make them more effective.  

But then, what can we do?  

You need to understand the content and figure out the best order to present it. Once you’ve designed the content structure or storyline, then you can use design to bring your ideas to life in a way that is easily understood and sticks with you forever.  

This leads us to define the skill of creating effective presentations as the intersection of at least three other key skills:   

Follow me, I’ll give you an example.  

A person with business experience will likely have a good understanding of the industry and be able to produce the content but will not have developed any design skills, nor be a great communication strategist.  

Better to be a designer, then?  

No, because a designer will have no business knowledge and will not be trained to be a great communicator.  

So, how can a business person learn how to create effective presentations?  

By combining the best of all these skills and changing the way you look at presentations. Lean Presentation Design, the first methodology for creating effective presentations in half the time specifically designed for business people, was born based on this profound observation.  

So, you’re not a designer, you’re not a communicator, you produce one corporate presentation after another, you have to stick to a predefined corporate PowerPoint template and you have little time to create effective presentations?  

Then, Lean Presentation Design is the methodology for you.  

Be wary of courses that promise you can learn creativity in a few days, beautify your presentations and make you a great speaker.  

These are skills that are learned over time and, for some of us, may even be unattainable.  

If you have a business profile, you won’t easily convert into a creative – and it wouldn’t do you any good. Don’t even waste your time trying.  

Lean Presentation Design is based on the idea of making this skill that lies at the intersection of graphic design and art accessible to those of us in the business world.   

You need to learn how to design effective storylines, rearrange your content in an attention-grabbing way, and visualize your ideas with immediate, easy-to-access, high-impact, actionable PowerPoint techniques.  

All clear?  

Well, now that you understand the core skills you need to acquire, it’s time to get into the details and learn how to evaluate an effective presentation course to make the best choice.   

How to Evaluate an Effective Presentations Course 

First of all, is the course for you, your team, or your company?  

If you’re a Talent Specialist and you’re looking for a course to address a business need, the first thing you need to figure out is how many people you need to train and the timeframe you have available to train your target population, so you can assess what’s the best way to deliver the training.  

You might decide to deliver the training live (remotely or in-person) and organize several classes, or you might opt for an online course that everyone can use according to their schedules.  

If, on the other hand, you were looking for a course for you or your team, it might be a more limited requirement with a smaller number of participants, for which a live training format (in-person or remote) might be the best solution.   

Is It Better to Have a Live or a Recorded Course for an Effective Presentation Course?  

It depends on your needs; both have their advantages and disadvantages.  

We provide both solutions, which you can browse on our website.  

A recorded course has the great advantage of giving everyone the opportunity to participate at their own convenience.  

I’ll give you an example considering the opposite case.  

In a live course, there are appointments scheduled at a time that should suit everyone.  

It is not certain, however, that the trainer will be in the best condition to teach at that time of day; perhaps he stayed up late the night before or has a bad cold. 

After all, participants may also have a last-minute work issue or prefer the morning to the afternoon or vice versa.  

So, a live course, whether in-person or remote, is still a compromise.  

If the course was recorded, however, everyone could take advantage of it at the time they felt most appropriate.  

When you put it that way, however, the recorded course always seems to be the best choice.  

Be careful. 

The live course has the great advantage of motivating people to engage. So, clear your schedule and set aside the necessary time.  

In addition, a live course has the great advantage of teacher interaction.  

In fact, when I give a live lecture, one of the parts that most enrich and make the intervention formative is precisely the exchange of opinions that is also made up of context-specific questions.  

What do you mean, Maurizio?  

Suppose I’m explaining to you how to present data, graphs, tables during your next business meeting.  

I would explain the theory and give you some examples, but you could share your presentation with me and ask me for some advice regarding your specific case. 

This level of interaction and personalization of training is only possible in a live course.  

The Lean Presentation Design course, for example, has many moments of interaction, during which exercises are proposed and we all practice together. 

Maurizio, do you think you can really interact even if the course is conducted remotely?  

Absolutely! I do it constantly. 

We make great use of the screen-sharing feature to follow the work of each participant and give feedback in real time.  

Tools such as Microsoft Teams, for example, allow you to take remote control of the trainee’s PC so you can show the steps in real time and directly on the PC. 

The chat is a very powerful tool because you can just copy and paste a slide, and everyone can see it.  

I also like to engage the rest of the class so that they can all make judgments about their colleagues’ exercises.  

This way, they get used to evaluating different solutions and compare with each other to see if they are working in the right direction.  

I believe that peer-to-peer comparison during a training is very constructive. 

Is an Effective Presentations Course Better In-Person or Remote?  

In the past, I trained thousands of people all over the world, traveling extensively from continent to continent.  

Then, we were forced to shift to an exclusively remote delivery mode.  

Everyone was scared at first; now, in less than two years, it’s become the norm.  

I will tell you that, in my opinion, online training has significant advantages that should not be overlooked at all. 

Do you really believe that remote training has advantages?  

Yes, absolutely.  

I remember that in order to deliver an important course like Lean Presentation Design, which is actually a course for effective presentations, the class had to be with me for three days.  

When I was in the corporate world, I always loved being out of the office for training.  

However, I realize that it’s hard to clear three days out of your schedule to get out of the office.  

Often, this leads to participants handling emails in the evening, perhaps tired after the course, or worse, during the course. 

In the online version, I never have meetings longer than two hours. This way, the course is spread out over several weeks, and it becomes easier to follow it in parallel with your work.  

Can you see the advantage?  

Let’s also not forget that the trainer no longer has to travel around the world, and this allows for greater delivery efficiency since the trainer is not traveling but at home, in a comfortable situation, and it costs the company less since they won’t have to pay all their travel expenses.  

Last but not least, a remote course allows you to cover multiple geographies simultaneously.  

So, if you have colleagues scattered over multiple countries, this way you can create a class that leaves room for everyone.  

How Do You Evaluate the Trainer Who Will Deliver the Effective Presentations Course? 

Be careful though, an excellent in-person trainer is not necessarily equally capable remotely.  

If you think about the wave of digitization in recent years, you quickly realize how many trainers have lost their jobs because they have not been able to evolve and adapt their teaching to remote modalities.  

Why does this matter so much? 

Technology, to take one example, is a critical success factor. Presenting online means knowing how to govern multiple tools in real time to keep interactions high and knowing how to engage your audience, making the training experience unforgettable without ever even meeting the participants. 

Does that sound easy?  

From experience, I can confirm that it’s definitely very hard.  

The trainer needs to be very agile, as they will find themselves working on one, two or more screens at the same time, switching between slide-presenting and demo-designing modes; therefore, they need to be quick to switch between screen-sharing modes.  

I often find myself working on multiple virtual desktops as well as multiple screens.  

At the same time, the trainer needs to maintain a high level of interaction, correct exercises by giving live feedback, be present in chat and respond to comments.  

In addition, it is important to remember that the trainer’s location can make a huge difference to a professional online presentation.  

For example, I have equipped myself with a professional camera for streaming, set of lights, external fans for cooling a gaming laptop optimized for streaming and professional microphone.  

This setup is the result of hundreds of hours of online training, and now I can offer an unprecedented level of delivery quality, especially if compared to a few years ago.  

So, should I limit my choice to trainers that have such a high level of technology?  

Personally, I think that when evaluating a trainer, you should check the ability and experience they have in training people online.  

Ask if they have done this before and what results they have had.  

An experienced trainer will certainly have references to show.  

I, for example, have collected over 200 on my LinkedIn profile at the time of writing this article:  

Make your own assessments but consider as many factors as possible to avoid setting up a classroom with an ineffective trainer.  

An important aspect, too, is the ability to deliver the training in multiple languages.  

The Lean Presentation Design course, for example, is delivered in Italian, English and French – and for the English version we have our own native speaker trainer. 

This is something you should always consider, especially if you’re considering a pilot-level training that you might later extend to a wider population. 

After all, we’re talking about an effective presentations course, so it’s critical that the trainer be able to present effectively remotely as well. 

I’ve written a very comprehensive guide on how to create presentations that are effective remotely or even how to create effective hybrid PowerPoint presentations, take a look at them and get an idea – your training journey could start right here! 

How to Evaluate the Content of an Effective Presentations Course ?

When evaluating the purchase of a course on effective presentations, it is critical to see some examples.  

How do I ask for a course example?  

No, I don’t mean of the course, I mean of the presentations.  

I’ll explain, follow me. 

I don’t like those trainings delivered by people who don’t really know the subject they are teaching.  

Think about it: all a trainer would need to do is pick up a few books on the subject to learn more about it than you do, and then come into the classroom and talk about it.  

Would that be effective?  

Maybe you’d even learn something, but you’d be completely missing out on moments of interaction. There are far too many trainers in the world of effective presentation courses who have never made a single slide for a client.  

The course in Lean Presentation Design, for example, comes from a long and established experience in creating effective presentations for our clients.  

On the homepage of my website: mauriziolacava.com you’ll be able to explore several success stories that clearly show how we apply our methodology to create effective presentations for our clients.  

What my team and I explain in the classroom is our daily work – we explain what we do and what we do best.  

We don’t do a mix of other approaches or other books, we bring to you concrete experience gained in the field with our clients and teach you a proprietary methodology, written and developed by me in Lean Presentation Design.  

Always ask for the course syllabus and make sure you understand it thoroughly.  

What are the topics that will be covered from lesson to lesson?  

In the case of the Lean Presentation Design course, you can download the entire presentation with the course syllabus directly from our website:  

You will receive a presentation with the details of each lesson and the complete organization of the course.  

If you want, you can also schedule a free consultation time with me to analyze your specific case. I’ll recommend the best solution for you.  

The content allows you to understand if the training objectives of the course match with your training goals.  

Also, you will need to pay attention to understand the level of difficulty of the course.  

Maurizio, are you saying it might be too difficult?  

Or perhaps too easy!  

The Lean Presentation Design course, for example, requires you to already have at least a basic knowledge of PowerPoint.  

Usually, I recommend taking PowerPoint classes before a Lean Presentation Design course because, if you have never used PowerPoint, since we use it in an advanced way, you might find yourself in trouble. 

If you do the self-paced course obviously this aspect will have a lesser impact because you won’t risk slowing down the trainer and the class – you can stop the video and watch it again whenever you want. 

Scheduled Course or Privately Organized and Tailored? 

There are some public courses that follow an independent calendar. In that case, you’ll need to ask when the next available edition is and sign up.  

Not all courses work this way, though. For example, the Lean Presentation Design course is reserved for companies that purchase it, and it’s custom-organized with a dedicated calendar.  

In short, the dates are set together, and the class will be internal to the company.  

Which of the two should you prefer?  

It depends – with the public course, you’ll be able to include one or two people, while with the private one, you must be able to form a minimum class.  

The advantage of the private one is that the course is dedicated to your company, you’ll be able to attend it with your colleagues, and it will also be possible to customize it while respecting the sensitivity of company information. 

In this case, therefore, it is crucial to understand how many people are planning to take the course, and you need to inquire about the minimum class size. 

In my experience, a smaller class size is not necessarily a problem. I’ve even done courses with as few as two participants, and this allowed me to dedicate much more time to the individual while offering a far more personalized and engaging experience.  

Available Budget 

Whether it’s for you or your company, you’ll still have a budget.  

How much are you going to spend to fund a course on effective presentations?  

First, you must ask yourself how much what you’ll learn is worth – which is why, a few paragraphs up, we looked at how to evaluate course content together.  

What impact do these new skills have on the business and the company?  

Maybe presentations will be more effective, messages will get through better, and everyone will finally have a common guideline to follow to objectively define whether a presentation was done well, protecting themselves from the subjective judgment of some old-fashioned director.  

Or they will simply improve interactions and therefore professional relationships between colleagues, facilitating moments of exchange and thus improving the company environment.  

Add to this the fact that people will probably waste a lot less time making presentations, so whether it’s your time or that of the organization you work for, it will be quite an achievement. 

Also, circling back to what was said earlier, you need to consider whether the course is private or public, and you’re just joining the next edition. Maybe it’s a course reserved for your company. 

How much is this all worth?  

It depends on you and the impact all these things have on your business, but please, think of an effective presentations course as a different experience than a PowerPoint course. So, be careful not to compare pears to potatoes ?  

For the Lean Presentation Design course, since the course is delivered privately for each company, contact us and we will schedule a brief call during which we will evaluate your training needs and make you an offer for the best solution for you. 

Internal Communication Support 

If you are a Talent Specialist, it will be your job to communicate the course internally and make it appealing to attract participants.  

If you fail, you will have blown the training opportunity.  

For this reason, the Lean Presentation Design course includes an informational pack of materials that you can share on the corporate Yammer portal, on the main Teams channels, and also by email. 

This way, you won’t have to worry about putting together the information to announce the course – it will already be there for you. 

Does It Teach You a Skill or Invent One?  

Is it a course that recycles other people’s content and repurposes it, or is it a new methodology that you have the opportunity to learn from the person who established it?  

This, as you may have guessed, is something I care a great deal about.  

The course in Lean Presentation Design, for example, is much more than just another effective presentation course, it’s actually an innovative methodology for approaching the way presentations are designed. 

For this reason, it is positioned as a unique course that combines communication strategy, graphic design, perception science and PowerPoint agility.  

Does It Include Tools Besides Training Materials?  

If the course you’re considering is original, it may include unique methodological tools or even proprietary software.  

In our course, we teach you how to use the acclaimed MLC PowerPoint Add-in, a software tool of our own invention that allows you to create better presentations by more than halving your processing time.  

In addition, in the course you will also learn how to use the Lean Presentation Strategy Canvas, a strategic framework for designing an effective storyline.  

If you’re curious to see how to design a storyline with the support of this tool, I recommend reading a recent article of mine – How to Present a Project Effectively. 

Finally, our course is enriched with a whole series of comprehensive in-depth guides that allow you to consolidate your learning and go further, for the more curious ones.  

Does It Provide a Certification?  

It may be for personal satisfaction, or perhaps to enrich your Linkedin profile and make you even more attractive in the market in which you operate.  

Recognition of your progress is crucial and, therefore, should be certified.  

There are courses that issue certificates of participation, and others that do not issue certificates at all.  

In our case, the certificate attests to more than just participation.  

In fact, at the end of the course, only those trainees who have successfully solved all three of the proposed case studies obtain the official certificate.  

Once obtained, the certificate can be added to the appropriate section on your Linkedin profile. 

What Happens After the Course? 

I have had the opportunity to attend many courses, and in most cases I ended up with a bitter taste in my mouth.  

What a bad feeling when a course that you enjoyed, that leaves you wanting to practice and wanting to discover more, stops and ends forever.  

I believe that every course is an opportunity to gather ideas and acquire skills, but then those skills must be developed.  

That’s why I think it’s essential to plan follow up moments after the course where people can meet and practice together.  

The Lean Presentation Design course, for example, includes 1 to 1 meetings with each participant after the course in order to work together on your own presentation.  

For those who want to review, deepen and continue to develop their skills or even those who want to find a lesson after some time, we have created an Online Learning Center, which is accessible for free.  

We have set up a private Teams community reserved for those who have attended and passed the Lean Presentation Design course, obtaining the official certification. 

It is a place of exchange where you can meet with colleagues from other countries and keep up to date with new techniques and opportunities.  

In short, I believe that learning is a journey and cannot be reduced to a moment, and for this reason the trainee must be accompanied on their journey, which will begin with the course, but that will only be the beginning.  

Conclusions 

Creating effective presentations is a skill at the foundation of doing business. It allows you to share your ideas and influence an audience to act.  

However, it is a special skill because it lives at the intersection of other skills that are often part of different educational and professional paths.  

There are many courses that recycle existing material and package it for a pretty delivery, but only a few bring to market an innovative methodology with proprietary tools that allow you to convey skills that lead to comprehensive results.  

Evaluating a course at this level is not easy, and you need to know what to ask and what aspects to consider to see if it’s right for you.  

In this guide, we’ve discussed all the aspects necessary to evaluate and choose the best effective presentation course for you or your company.