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New survey: 70% say presentation skills are critical for career success.

• For example, 20% of respondents said they would do almost anything to avoid giving a presentation including pretending to be sick or asking a colleague to give the presentation
• In the information age you are only as valuable as the ideas you have to share.
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Seventy percent of employed Americans who give presentations agree that presentation skills are critical to their success at work, according to a new Prezi survey. My first reaction? The other 30% don’t know it yet.

Prezi, the cloud-based presentation platform company, collaborated with Harris to survey employed professionals about their attitudes on presentations. Prezi also asked me to review the survey results. The findings reflect just how important presentations skills are to one’s career, and also reveal the extreme measures people take to get out of giving a presentation. For example, 20% of respondents said they would do almost anything to avoid giving a presentation including pretending to be sick or asking a colleague to give the presentation , even if it means “losing respect” in the workplace.

The fear of presenting is very real among professionals in corporate America today, so much so that that many people are desperate to avoid it. It’s a problem because the survey also reveals that telling a clear and persuasive story through presentations is a fundamental job requirement and a necessary component of career success. In the information age you are only as valuable as the ideas you have to share.  Poor presentation skills mean that leaders fail to inspire their teams, products fail to sell, entrepreneurs fail to attract funding, and careers fail to soar. That seems like a big price to pay for neglecting such a basic skill that anyone can improve upon.

There is hope for anyone who wants to improve at this critical career skill and, according to the Prezi survey, plenty of people want help. Seventy-five percent of those who give presentations say they would like to be better at presenting  and to ‘captivate the audience.’ One way to improve presentation skills is simply to watch great presentations. Thanks to sites like TED.com , anyone with an Internet connection and a computer or mobile device can watch the world’s most awe-inspiring presentations delivered in 18-minutes.

Recently I spoke to author and investigative reporter David Epstein who delivered this TED talk in March that has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. On the 18-minute time limit that all TED talks are required to follow he said, “It forced me to be really sharp with my transitions, and to pick examples that I could explain really succinctly, even if they were not the simplest ideas in the world. With that amount of time, you know you can only make so many points, so you're forced to make them count.” Epstein’s TED experience also taught him the importance of delivering a visually engaging presentation that adds to the narrative, and doesn’t simply mirror the speaker’s words. “The slides should supplement the talk, not give it. The speaker is the performer, and the slides are supporting actors.”

Epstein’s presentation is visually engaging and beautifully designed, a common element in many of the best TED presentations. If you want to improve your presentation skills, here are several other TED talks I would recommend that you watch.

“Why Schools Kill Creativity,” by Sir Ken Robinson (Skillful use of humor and storytelling).

“My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor (Dr. Jill rehearsed this presentation 200 times before delivering it).

“We Need to Talk About an Injustice” by Bryan Stevenson (Stevenson tells three stories to support his theme, accounting for 65% of his content).

The fact is that traditional presentations are often boring. In the Prezi survey, 46% of respondents admit that they’ve been distracted during a co-worker’s presentation. Instead of watching the presentation they often do the following tasks: send text messages, answer email, surf the Internet, check social media, or fall asleep. Creating and delivering a presentation that engages hearts and minds does take work and creativity, but with easy access to some of the best presentations on the planet there are plenty of examples to model.

Carmine Gallo is a communication coach, keynote speaker, and author of several bestselling books including  The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and his latest Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets Of The World’s Top Minds .

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The 11 Best Features of Prezi to Create Meaningful Presentations

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Prezi is an all-in-one communication and collaboration suite that takes care of slideshows, graphic designing, and even social media posts. It has features like Prezi Design, Prezi Video, and Prezi Present to make notable presentations.

In this article, we outline the features of Prezi that make you a master of presentations.

Open Canvas Slideshows

Prezi slideshow canvas is a fresh and more creative approach to slideshow making than any other apps. All the slideshow pages show up in one large canvas. The following features are essential in designing great presentations:

1. Zooming on Topics

Prezi calls individual slides topics. So, you can add multiple topics to increase the length of the presentation. Within each topic, you can add many subtopics. You can control how a subtopic appears and moves away within a slide by choosing different Subtopic layouts .

If you zoom onto a topic, that element will open as a new slide so that you can make fine adjustments. You can also zoom in on subtopics.

2. Free Movements

Unlike other slideshow makers, you don’t need to go back and forth to revisit the previous slide during the presentation. All you need to do is zoom out to maximum by scrolling up the mouse wheel, and then drag the canvas to pinpoint a topic that you want to revisit. Now, zoom in again to open that slide.

Related: Slideshow Design Mistakes You Should Avoid in Your Next Presentation

3. Zoom Reveal

In usual slideshow makers, all elements are visible on the slide unless you apply transitions. It's a time-consuming task. However, the Zoom Reveal feature of Prezi helps you show critical details as you keep unfolding the story.

Add multiple subtopics within primary topics. By zooming in on the subtopics, you can generate a creative effect of unfolding new facts as you go on with the presentation.

Drag-and-Drop Slideshow Building

Prezi makes slideshow making simple through their drag-and-drop slideshow editor. The following are the basic elements that you need to create a professional presentation:

You can use the Prezi Design tool to create informative charts and graphs. You can simply pick a pre-built infographic or chart from the canvas and edit that to meet your requirements. Furthermore, you’ll find many pre-built formats like Reports, Dashboards, Email Headers, Posters, Social Posts, etc.

5. Element Blocks

Prezi’s presentation builder looks kind of a modular tool. You’ve got everything that you need in the Explorer menu on the right side. All you need to do is choose the one you like and place it on the canvas. In this app, you don’t need to draw shapes from scratch.

You can right-click on the canvas to bring up the menu where you’ll find element blocks for text, image, and topic. On the same menu, you’ll see the option to modify the background. Prezi has an image library of royalty-free images for you to use.

You can further beautify the slideshow by applying custom color for the topics and subtopics. The Subtopic layouts enable you to customize the way topics appear on the final presentation.

The Prezi media library consists of royalty-free Photos , GIFs , and Stickers . When you click the Insert image option from the menu, the library appears automatically on the right-hand side.

You can drag-and-drop images or stickers to your canvas and customize them by right-clicking on any media. You may also upload your own media or embed videos from other sources to play them directly in the presentation slides.

7. Professional Branding

Branding is an essential part of your profession. Therefore, branding shouldn’t be a complicated task. That’s where Prezi becomes useful. From the Change colors option, you can access the right-side menu that shows many color palettes.

Click on the Create new icon to define your own brand color palette. When you create a second presentation, you can select this personalized palette to apply your brand design.

Related: How to Keep Your Branding Consistent With Adobe Spark

Smart Presentations

Don’t just present! Show your creativity, knack for technology, and professional body language when presenting in video meetings. That’s how smart the Prezi presentation is. Here are some of the features that help you along the way:

8. Slideshows on Video

Picture-in-picture mode for video call-based slides presentation could become boring. However, when your slideshow and you appear on the same screen, that’s way more interesting.

You get an elaborate presentation console where you can adjust slideshows and your video to maintain the flow. You can show gestures that perfectly sync with a certain figure or chart appearing on the screen or moving away.

9. Offline Presentation

If you need to present slides when there is no Wi-Fi connectivity, you can do that on Prezi. For offline presentation purposes, there is a desktop app that you can download on laptops.

You can also install the Prezi smartphone app on an Android or iOS mobile. Then you can download essential presentations from your account when you get the internet. Now, sync your mobile with your laptop by using the Start remote feature on the mobile app and present offline.

Download: Prezi for Windows | Android | iOS (Free)

10. Presenter Tools

Prezi offers smart tools to help you present effortlessly. It has different features for presentations like Presenter view, Live Prezi, and Voice-over.

Presenter view shows you talking points, prompts, and notes while you present the slide decks. You can only see this extra content on your device and not the audience. Live Prezi turns boring presentations into engaging live-streaming.

You can share a secured link within the target community so that the invitees can stream your presentations on their devices. Here, Voice-over helps you record the stepwise narration.

11. Analyze Presentation Performance

Prezi has an elaborate tool to give you an idea about your slideshow performance. The View Analytics tool helps you measure metrics like time spent, viewership, and shares. Here is how the slideshow analytics help different professionals:

• Teachers can find out if the students are going through the slide decks or not. They can also know which students didn’t view the slides.
• A freelance designer can discover if the public likes the slide decks or not by analyzing the views, shares, and total hours spent per viewer.

Present Ideas or Data in an Immersive Way

The above-mentioned features of Prezi enable you to create and present slideshows in a way that makes the audience happy. You’ll be able to communicate your data to the mass in an immersive set up where video, content, and design work hand in hand.

Like Prezi, there are other potential slideshow-making apps that you can also try out to choose the one that suits your style.

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Presentation Habits Presenters Don’t Like To Admit

Get your team on prezi – watch this on demand video.

Chelsi Nakano June 15, 2016

How many presentations do you experience in a week? The chances are good that, whether you’re up on stage or sitting in the audience, presentations are a large part of your life. From the classroom to the board room, one of the key ways we express ourselves and our ideas is through public speaking. But are presentations getting the job done in today’s workplace?

The answer is yes and no—while the majority of professionals agree that presentations are essential for career success, many of them also find slide-based presentations ineffective, and a surprisingly high number of professionals hate giving presentations. We team ed up with Harris Poll, one of the longest running and most reputable barometers of public opinion in the United States, and best-selling author and executive coach Carmine Gallo to conduct a survey to learn more about the role th at presentations play in the life of a professional today. We asked over 2,000 people in the United States how they feel about presentations in the workplace—and some of their answers took us by surprise. Take a look at the prezi below to see the results, or continue reading to learn more.

PRESENTATION SKILLS ARE THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN THE MODERN WORKPLACE.

For many business professionals, public speaking, whether in the form of a sales pitch or an executive update, is an essential skill. Nearly 70% of the people surveyed who present regularly agreed that presentations are critical to their success at work—and 75% of the presenters surveyed indicated that they would like to improve their presentation skills. Clearly, there’s still work to be done.

PRESENTATIONS ARE KEY—BUT WHO’S REALLY LISTENING?

Presentations may be critical, but they’re also often falling on deaf ears. Almost two-thirds of the presenters surveyed agreed that slide-based presentations, so common in the modern workplace, can be boring and ineffective. Almost half of the respondents admitted to doing something other than listening during a co-worker’s presentation—popular answers included sending a text message (28%), checking email (27%), and falling asleep (17%).

GLOSSOPHOBIA LEAVES A LOT OF PRESENTERS RUNNING FOR THE HILLS.

More than one in five employed adults said they would do something in order to get out of presenting—one in every ten admitted that they would pretend to be sick. And when avoiding the presentation isn’t an option, professionals are willing to go to extreme measures to reduce their anxiety at surprising rates. 5% of the employed adults surveyed said they would take a shot of alcohol, and 7% said they would try medication, in order to alleviate nerves before a big speech.

Clearly, presentations are important; as Carmine Gallo puts it, “In the information age—the knowledge economy—you are only as valuable as the ideas you have to share.” The way we give presentations in the modern workplace, however, is leaving many presenters and audiences cold. It doesn’t have to be this way. At Prezi, we’re committed to helping presenters express themselves more effectively, so they feel more confident and audiences become more engaged. Join us, and become part of the movement to banish boring presentations.

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