Communications Training Programmes, Presentations Skills

Presentation Skills – In Person or Virtually

This course will make you a better presenter and a better communicator. Whether you are presenting in person or via Teams, Skype, WebX or Zoom.

Regardless of your level of experience we have a course and a consultant who can help you improve. We’ll improve your understanding of your audience, improve your presentation content and presentation structure, improve your delivery and improve your use of visual aids or slides.

During COVID 19, we have adapted our offering to fully replicate the experience online. Working remotely, we can still record your presentation, play it back live and assess it together. And then give you a clear road map to improvement.

Here’s how we’ll do it. We make you stand up and present. We’ll record you. And then we’ll watch, carefully. And listen, intently. We look at how well you relate to your audience. We’ll assess the structure and sequence of your communication. We’ll analyse your use of data and illustration. We’ll test your assertions and interrogate your visuals. And then we’ll show you how to improve.

You’ll leave our course with the ability to craft interesting, understandable, relevant and memorable presentations. And you’ll leave with a skillset that is practical and applicable to every interaction you have.

Pitch Preparation

If you’re pitching for business, we can increase your chances of success. We’ll help you win business.

We’ve done it for individuals pitching for initial investments funding, for large corporations pitching for large contracts, and for procurement teams securing large government tenders.

We help from the very start of the process. From the initial research and client conversations, right through to the actual pitch on the day.

We’ll show you how to assess your audience, how to structure your pitch, how to deliver it with confidence and sincerity and how to deal with aggressive, probing and intensive questioning.

If you work with us on a pitch, we guarantee that you will be ready and prepared to deliver the best possible version of your story to the client. We’ll provide you with a competitive edge.

Media Skills

Our training will give you the skills and techniques to excel in any media interview.

Through practical and realistic training scenarios, we’ll ensure that you have the knowledge and ability to face different interview types, styles and situations. And to perform to the best of your ability.

We’ve been doing this for decades. We’ve seen it all. And so we’re confident we can help you prepare for, and thrive in, any interview.

Whether you are a beginner, a seasoned expert or somewhere in between, we have a course that will meet your needs. We can work on an individual or group basis. We offer half day, full day, two day and bespoke courses.

Press Officer Training

Simply put, this course will make you a better press officer. Better at writing, better at influencing, better at managing the media and better at managing yourself or your team.

We offer three strands of press officer programmes; a programme tailored for newly appointed executives learning the ropes, a programme to hone the skill of working press officers and a programme for experts in their field.

Press Officers’ needs vary depending on their experience, their seniority, their industry and their ability. Therefore, we tailor our content accordingly. We ensure that the programme is as relevant, tailored and thus impactful as possible.

Broadcaster training

Some of our consultants (the more senior ones) have been training broadcasters for more than forty years. Would-be broadcasters come to us for preliminary training. Long-established broadcasters come to us for refreshment training. We help them (if they have editorial input into their programme) decide what format, structure and topics will fit with that audience.

Most importantly we help them develop their skill.

Presenting is one of those odd jobs where people assume it’s a natural gift, not a learned competence. That’s a flawed assumption. It’s handy having natural flair, just like it’s easier to be a good journalist if you have an innate ability as a writer. But flair alone won’t make a career.

We’ve worked with some of the top broadcasters in the country and internationally. And we won’t say who. If you come to us, we won’t say who you are either, but we’ll make you better.

Speechwriting

We can help you write speeches that are interesting, understandable, memorable and natural.

The Written Word and the Spoken Word are different languages. If you’re writing a speech for your CEO, you don’t want her to sound as if she’s reading an essay. If you’re writing a speech for a public figure, you want them to sound real and to use references that come from their own lives, their own reading.

Our speechwriter training covers anaphoras and tricolons and occultation, but you’d never know, because we guarantee you a jargon-free zone with little theory but lots of practical ways to write a stunning speech. Our courses show speechwriters how to identify speech patterns and references used by their speaker. It teaches them how to develop themes and put coherent structure on a speech. It explains how to interweave illustration, metaphor, allegory and quotations around data to make it relevant, fresh and captivating.

Whether you are writing a speech for yourself or someone else, for an international conference or for a wedding, we can give you the skills to craft a genuine, impactful and entertaining speech.

Writing for Business

We’ll help you or your employees write well.

We’ll help you get past the fear of the blank screen. We’ll help you create documents, reports, e-mails and letters that achieve what you want, efficiently and effectively.

In short, we’ll ensure that your writing is understandable and professional at all times.

And we’ll do it in a way that won’t bore you out of your skull. A lot of writing programmes make the participants think they’ve gone back to school. Ours don’t. They are practical, engaging and immediately useful.

You’ll learn about structuring documents, paragraphs and sentences. You’ll get your grammar and syntax gently massaged. You’ll gain the ability to spot second-degree words, to tell active language from passive and to identify weak intensifiers, blended metaphors and over-long sentences.

Writing for Publication

Whatever you’ve got to write, we can help.

We can show you the rules that underpin all good writing, as well as the specific approaches that apply to different publications and audiences.

Good, publishable writing is based on a combination of skill with the written word and an understanding of the end reader.

The consultants who provide this training have extensive experience writing for publication. They have written for national and local newspapers, they’ve written books, they’ve ghostwritten opinion pieces and they’ve written content for online publications.

They know the essential rules, skills, behaviours and methods. And they know how to teach you them.

This modular, practical course will turn you into a better writer. You’ll have a better understanding of your audience. You’ll know how to start with impact, how to end to induce action, how to convey complex information and how to craft an engaging narrative.

Making An Impact

Our Making An Impact course focuses on giving you or your team the skill set to be impactful, memorable and influential in every professional interaction. We look at your ability to communicate clearly, negotiate and build relationships.

Skills like presenting, listening, questioning in a non-threatening way, communication, influencing and negotiating are elicited through the training.

What we do is look at real interactions and ‘thin-slices’ them, so that you can learn to handle clients effectively, build relationships and make an impact in every communication. It allows you to learn how to exploit your own best attributes and how to develop in the areas they needed help with.

It’s a bespoke course that is tailored to the needs of the professionals or executives undergoing the training.

Meeting, Chairing & Facilitating Skills

Meetings are necessary but all too often they are unproductive.

Meetings should be places for decisions to be made, actions to be agreed and information imparted. They shouldn’t be talking shops, dominating by side discussions and dominant personalities.

Whether you are chairing a meeting or just participating in one, there is an onus on you to make the meeting as productive, useful and time efficient as possible. This course will give you the skills to do that.

Designed for a group, the course will give your team the skills to ensure they are able to effectively facilitate discussions, meetings and conversations in a productive, efficient but engaging manner. They’ll be equipped with the skills to effectively guide group discussions, solve problems, reach consensus and plan strategies.

They’ll have a clear understanding of the importance of planning in advance of a meeting, knowing how and when to adapt their style and be able to encourage discussion, generate ideas and make decisions.

The course will also give the skills and structures to ensure that they are able to contribute in the most understandable and clear manner possible.

We also have an individual or group course which focuses solely on the chairing and facilitation of meetings.

Executive Coaching

We provide comprehensive, long term communications coaching to individuals at all levels. Our executive coaching is practical, tailored and intense.

The sessions start with an initial meeting where we delve into what exactly it is you need to be better at; what are your communication goals? What are your objectives? What problems are you facing and what are the reasons behind them that are under your control?

We then base our sessions around upcoming professional interactions, both preparing for and debriefing on, major communication events. This allows for a constant feedback cycle to see if actual, not just theoretical, changes are occurring.

Approaching coaching in this way ensures long-term, effective changes in behavior.

Bespoke Communications

Our expertise is communications. That comes in many forms and with many labels. Many of which are described above. But we can help you with any communication need.

There is no communication we haven’t helped people prepare for in the past. Over the decades we’ve dealt with everything. From niche needs like preparing politicians for leadership hustings to broad, big challenges like training hundreds of staff for one multinational corporation across Ireland, UK and South East Asia.

If you feel your need doesn’t match any of the courses above, just give us a shout. We’ll have a chat. And we’ll work out how we can help.

Presenting & Pitching - In Person and via Video Conference

Presentation Skills – In Person or Virtually

Pitch Preparation

Media Skills

Media Skills

Press Officer Training

Broadcaster training

Writing Skills

Speechwriting

Writing for Business

Writing for Publication

Business Communications

Making An Impact

Meeting, Chairing & Facilitating Skills

Executive Coaching

Bespoke Communications

All of our courses can be run on an individual or group basis.

Our individual courses take about two hours. Group courses can be a half day, full day or two days in duration.

All our training is tailored to the clients' individual requirements.