Oral presentations can be as important to your career as written reports. Almost every job requires speaking skills. You may make sales pitches to prospective clients, give evaluations of products or policies, offer progress reports, and make appeals or explanations to public officials. It is important to learn how to give both informal briefings and formal presentations. To advance up the corporate ladder, you need to be a confident, well-prepared, persuasive speaker.

Informal Briefings
Semiformal oral reports are a routine part of many jobs. For example, you might need to explain a policy to coworkers, demonstrate a new piece of equipment, or summarize a meeting you attended. These presentations are usually short, but you won't always be given advance notice. When you do have notice, you can prepare by writing down a few key points you plan to cover (in chronological order or from cause to effect) and highlighting key phrases and terms to stress. Make your comments brief and to the point.

Formal Presentations
A formal presentation is much longer than an informal briefing. It is less conversational and is intended for a wider audience. Before you begin preparing a formal presentation, find out who will be in your audience and why they will be there. Relate everything in your talk to your audience, and remember the differences between the audience for a written report and the audience for a speech. (For example, an audience for a speech can't go back and review what you said and cannot absorb as many technical details as you would put in a written report.) When analyzing the audience for a presentation, remember these four key rules:

1. Find out what unites them as a group. Are they members of the same profession? Customers using the same product?
2. Determine how much they know about your topic. Will they understand the terms, jargon, and background of your subject?
3. Establish how interested they are in your topic. Are they highly motivated by your topic, mildly interested in it, or downright hostile to it?
4. Anticipate their most likely response to you. Will they be open-minded, mildly skeptical, or antagonistic?

Also consider your audience's cultural taboos and protocols. Will they frown on your making eye contact with them? Will they expect you to stand in one place, or will you be able to move around? For presentations before an international audience, be especially careful about introducing humor, steer clear of politics, and choose visuals with universally understood symbols.

Consider as well how much time you'll have to speak and when you'll be speaking (Monday morning or Friday afternoon are more difficult than other times). Also find out if someone will introduce you or you will begin on your own, so you won't be repetitive.

There are several ways to make a formal presentation:

1. Speaking "off the cuff." Don't try this unless you're a professional speaker. For the rest of us, making a presentation without any preparation whatsoever is the worst possible approach.
2. Memorizing the presentation. This is the opposite of the off-the-cuff approach. It has pitfalls, too: if you forget a word or sentence, you may get lost; you can appear stiff and mechanical; and memorizing a presentation requires many hours that would be better spent researching or organizing.
3. Reading from a script. Most presentations do not require such rigid adherence to specific words and will profit more from interacting with the audience.
4. Delivering the presentation extemporaneously. This is usually the best approach, in which you prepare an outline of the major points and rehearse using it. This leaves you both prepared and able to interact with the audience.

The Parts of a Presentation
A presentation should include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction is the most important part. It captures the audience's attention by telling them who you are, what your qualifications are, what you are talking about, and how it is relevant to them. Your most important goal is to establish a rapport with your audience.

The body is the longest part, just as in a long report. It supplies the substance of your speech by explaining a process, describing a condition, telling a story, arguing a case, or doing all of these. Give your audience cues to where you are going by enumerating your points, emphasizing cause-and-effect relationships, and using verbal signposts. Comment on your own material: tell the audience if something is particularly important. Repeat key ideas and provide internal summaries.

The conclusion should contain something lively and memorable and leave the audience with the feeling that you have come full circle. You might restate your three or four main points, include a call to action, or place final emphasis on a key statistic.

Using Visuals
Visuals can arouse an audience's interest, add variety, explain information quickly, summarize information, and reinforce main points. Visuals for a presentation must be prepared even more carefully than visuals for a written report. They must be clear, simple, and memorable. Make sure they are readable. Make them easy to understand, relevant, and self-explanatory (the visual should explain itself, not need to be explained by you). Do not set up your visuals before you begin speaking; it will distract the audience from what you're saying.

Delivering a Presentation
An audience will judge you by how you look, how you talk, and how you move (your body language). Establish eye contact with your audience. Do not fix your eye on a single individual; alternate looking at different members of the audience as you speak. Use a friendly, confident tone. Vary the rate of your speech and adjust your volume appropriately. Watch your posture; don't slouch or stand motionless like a statue. Watch your audience's reactions, and adjust to them. Be natural and consistent—don't suddenly pound on the table or make a gesture that will distract your audience. Dress professionally—conservative and formal.