Are you looking to build an incredible career in cloud computing? If so, this video is for
you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects. And we're
an organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
In today's video, we're going to be discussing Cloud Architect presentation skills, which
is one of the most critical skills for Cloud Architects. In actuality, learning great presentation
skills for technology professionals is really one of the most critical tech career skills.
And in my career, I have delivered thousands upon thousands of presentations and as a Cloud
Architect or a Thought Leader working in technology, presentations are going to be an important
part of your job. And if you can master delivering great presentations, your career will rise
and it will rise very quickly. Now we have a four step process that we recommend for
delivering a perfect technology presentation. And our strategy involves realistically speaking,
four stages.
The first stage involves planning your presentation. The next phase revolves around preparing your
presentation. The phase after that involves practicing your presentation. And then lastly,
we're going to present. And that's our stage. So let's talk about what we recommend doing
at each stage. Because if you can deliver an incredible presentation, it can help you
get hired, it can help you get promoted. If you're working in sales, it can increase your
sales. Great presentation skills are critical to anyone's technology career and they're
especially critical for your cloud computing career or your Cloud Architect career.
So let's talk about the plan. Realistically speaking, if you plan your presentation, it's
just going to flow better. So when you plan your presentation, what do you start with?
What is your objective in mind? What is the goal that you're looking for? What is the
outcome that you're looking for? Your presentation should build upon the outcome you're looking
for. The outcome could be to buy your technology solution. The outcome could be to implement
a security protocol that you desire, but there should always be a plan and a purpose to your
presentation. And your purpose and your plan should guide your users to get them to the
destination. You start out at point A and the purpose of the presentation is to guide
them to point B. That's your presentation so make sure that's part of your plan.
Now, in order to plan this out, you really want to research your audience as much as
possible. How old are they? How educated are they? What are they made of? What do they
like? What they dislike, learn as much as you can about the audience so that you can
position your presentation any amount of this is going to resonate well with your audience,
because this is really important. For example, if I was going to Greece, I would not deliver
a presentation in English. I would deliver it in Greek, assuming I spoke Greek, which
I do. Why? Because I want to deliver it in the language of my audience, I want to deliver
the message in something my audience cares about. The things that a CEO cares about for
example, are very different from what an implementation engineer cares about.
So I need to know who's in the audience so I can cater my message to the audience so
I can deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time. Now, I also need
to really consider as I'm planning, where's the location going to be? Is it via Zoom,
in which case I may do it a certain way. Is it a 10,000 person audience? If so, I'm going
to have to deliver the presentation differently. I might have to focus on different corners
of the room to create some sort of level of eye contact, which is necessarily impractical
in an audience that size, but I still might need to do it. I might have to accommodate
for outside sizes. So in the plan, realistically, what you're going to look for, is the objective
that you'll have for the presentation, because your presentation should meet some point or
an objective.
Then you're going to research the audience, so you know how to best communicate with the
audience. And from there, you need to know where the location of the place is going to
be, the venue if you will, so you know how to optimize your presentation. Now that you've
done your planning and you know your outcomes and where your location is going to be. Now,
you're going to have to prepare the presentation. If you don't prepare it, it's going to look
like you created it on the fly and that's not going to deliver the perfect message.
So first and foremost, organize your flow. And the flow of your presentation should be
as follows.
First and foremost, tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Then, present your
prepared material. And then after you're presented your material, again tell the audience what
you've told them, so summarize. So here's what it's going to look like. First, tell
them what you're going to tell them, present your material, and then tell them what you've
told them, so summarize. Now that's the way you should flow a presentation, but what should
the flow inside of the presentation look like? Well, when you're a technology professional,
maybe you're a Cloud Architect, you're a Cloud Engineer, you could be a Network Architect,
it really doesn't matter. But when you're presenting technology, some of these technology
things are fairly complicated. And different people in your audience are going to have
different things that they care about.
Business executives... And this is the way we recommend all Cloud Architects and all
technology professionals present, by starting with the solution and then showing substantiating
evidence. Now you find that engineers often talk about all the evidence and mountains
and mountains of evidence before they get to the solution. The problem is, many people
will tune out before they get to the solution. So remember the whole point of a presentation
is to have an outcome in mind, to guide a user from one way of thinking to another way
of thinking. Or to guide the user why the architecture you designed is what's right
for their solution. So present it like an executive.
First and foremost, the flow really needs to be, what is your solution? Then provide
your substantiating evidence as to why your solution is right. Now, when you're going
to do this, this is where you have the opportunity to cover three to six pieces of evidence of
why your rationale is right. Why do I say three to six? You should never go above six
because the human brain can remember four to six things at a time and no more. So the
second you go above six, you've lost your audience. So never go above six. Four to six
is the max, three to five is probably a really good number. So start with your main raw content
and then provide your substantiating evidence and now summarize the solution. And that's
it.
So basically start with the solution, provide your substantiating evidence and then summarize
why your solution was right again. Just like the format of the presentation. Now that you've
done this, now that you've prepared your presentation, now you've got to go practice it because we
want this to be perfect. Now, when it comes to practice, practice makes permanent. So
if you're doing something wrong, you're going to make it consistently wrong. Perfect practice,
by comparison makes things perfect. So you really are going to want to practice this
and you're going to want to try and get some feedback along the way. So I'll tell you what
we mean by the practice.
Now first and foremost, when it comes to communication, here's what the data from Harvard suggests.
When we're presenting, 55% of the presentation is what we look like when we say something.
Now 38% is what we sound like when we say something, and 7% is your actual content.
So if you're going to deliver a great presentation, remember your appearance matters. Your body
language matters, your gestures matter, your stance matters. For example, if I stand like
this, I don't look very powerful or capable. But if I stand like this and ready for action,
and I take up more space, I do, so that's practice stuff. Practice gestures. Do they
help, do they take away? Vary your vocal tones, really try and deliver a full presentation
that involves audio, video, and of course your content.
And that's basically going to be about what you look like and what you sound like when
you say something. Practice these things, but also whenever possible, try to integrate
a true story that your audience will be able to connect to. Sometimes you can talk about
a solution and you can talk about a rationale why, but you need a story to drive the points
home. And storytelling, assuming it's authentic and real, is a very powerful way to communicate
your message and could and should be integrated in presentations when appropriate. Now, if
you're going to integrate stories in your presentations, it's really important, they
must be authentic. Never lie as part of your presentation, be authentic. That's really
what matters. People can feel it when you're not authentic, they can feel it when you're
disingenuine are not going to like it.
So practice your gestures, practice your vocal tones. Try to practice a story to try and
sell your points. But remember to be authentic. Now in this practice phase, video record yourself
if you can and then use that as feedback to deliver a much better presentation. And if
you're not recording yourself, present to some friends or some peers or some people
along the way, that can say, "I like this. I don't like this." And tune it, because realistically
speaking in this practice, you want to get better. You want to work towards that perfect
practice. Now that you've planned it and you prepared it and you've practiced it, it's
showtime. Now you're going to deliver your presentation. So when you deliver your presentation,
a couple of things.
First and foremost, try and grab the audience and bring them to you as fast as possible.
Why? Because if you don't grab their attention quickly, they're not going to pay attention
and the presentation doesn't mean anything. So try and grab them as fast as possible.
Now in your intro, get to the point and fast. People have very short attention spans, especially
busy people. And the higher you move up the executive ranks, the shorter the attention
span is going to be. Now these are very smart people. They don't have a short attention
span because they have attention deficit disorder. What happens is, when you have a thousand
phone calls and emails coming in per day, and you've got 20 meetings that take up your
entire day, your evenings and your weekends, you're busy. So you don't have a lot of time.
So get to the point quick, drag them in. And they're going to be listening to you.
Now, when you're speaking, try to use different language styles, there're visual learners,
there're kinesthetic learners, there're auditory learners, and make sure you're communicating
in that language of your audience. Visual people typically dress nice. Visual people
talk about things like, "I see what you mean." Visual people have organized offices and they
have to have things that look attractive. And when you're dealing with visual people,
which by the way, is the majority of the population, you need to communicate using visual terms.
"I see what you mean. See, if you adopt this solution, you're going to be in a much better
place." Add the words that are about vision for visual people.
Now, when you're dealing with auditory people, auditory and people learn via listening. They
say things like, "I hear you." They listen to a lot of music. They learn via sound. So
communicate things using sound type terms so you can capture the auditory people. And
also capture the kinesthetics. Kinesthetic people basically feel things. And your kinesthetic
person will say, "I feel you." Because they're communicating that they feel what you're saying.
The kinesthetic person will often wear soft clothes. The kinesthetic person likes the
way things feel. So when you're dealing with three various populations and you're going
to deal with all of them in the audience, make sure you communicate.
Talk about the visual terms, talk about the auditory terms, talk about the kinesthetic
terms and the people along the way are going to be bought in. And they're going to listen.
So when you're delivering your presentation, make sure you address all the people in the
audience. Make sure you're authentic, use an authentic story to drive your point home.
And make sure you're communicating across all things. Now, there are people that have
some anxiety around speeches. If you do use some type of relaxation technique, use some
breathing techniques, and they can assist you in relaxation during delivery and presentation.
But when you're presenting, if you lose your train of thought, just pause for a second
and take a deep breath and recapture it.
During the presentation if you miss a word, that's okay, keep going. The show must go
on. So today we talked about how you deliver a perfect technology presentation to boost
your Cloud Architect career or your cloud computing career. Because regardless of your
career, whether you're a Cloud Architect, Solutions Architect, Network Engineer, working
on your presentation skills should be a critical part of your tech career development program.
Let me tell you about some things we do at Go Cloud Architects to help the cloud architect
community. Every Monday and every Thursday, we have a completely free, How to Get Your
First Cloud Architect Job webinar. And on these How to Get Your First Cloud Architect
Job webinars, we teach you everything you need to get hired.
We teach you what hiring managers desire. We teach you what counts as experience and
how to get it. We teach you how to be the hiring manager's dream hire. We teach you
what hiring managers desire, and we teach you everything that you would need to know
to get your first Cloud Architect job and so many more things. And we do this for free
on Monday on Thursday, and we even spend one hour answering any tech questions that you
have. Now, every Tuesday morning, we actually have a Cloud Architect experience webinar,
and we'll do one of these two things. We will talk about the kind of labs that employers
will look at it and say, "Wow." So you can get hired as well as how you can actually
learn how to be a Cloud Architect and how you can learn how to be cloud architect competent.
We talk about this on these calls. Many of these Tuesdays, we do free cloud architect,
architecture challenges, where we'll basically give you some customer requirements and you'll
as a team, get to design this architecture, just like you would in your own cloud architect
job. So we're really working on building your cloud computing careers in any of these free
webinars that we do. Now on most Wednesdays, we do a completely free Cloud Architect career
question and answer session. In which case, you can ask us any questions you have about
building your Cloud Architect career, or how to get your first Cloud Architect job, or
how to get your first cloud job, or how to get promoted in technology, or the things
that you need to learn.
We do this completely free most Wednesdays. If you have any questions, you can send an
email to Ask Cloud Mike. And if you send an email to ask Cloud Mike about some things,
we'll do the best we can to make a YouTube video for you to help answer your Cloud Architect
or your tech career questions. I'd like to thank you so much for watching this video.
It is a real pleasure and an honor, and a true privilege to be part of the cloud computing
community. And I am so thankful to be here. Thank you so much for watching this video
and I will see you in another video very soon.