Everyone has to go through a lot of firsts in their career. The first assignment, the first paycheck, the first staff meeting and the first presentation will be experienced early in your career. Except the first presentation, everything should go through smoothly.

The first presentation is something different. In your first presentation your education, initial experiences and street smart will be tested. Your first presentation will practically make or break your career.

Ofcourse, there are careers with remote possibility of having a presentation. Those who opted to such careers may have to stay with their position without any chances of career advancement. You should expect to have a presentation of any kind since through smart presentation, you are showing that you are a leader and you are innovative in ways to improve productivity for the company. Some could even go as far as 30 minutes in their presentation.

“Short and Sweet” Challenge

The problem with the 5-minute presentation is not actually based on the presentation itself. It is about cramming all your ideas to five minutes. You need to persuade everyone that your ideas are highly viable in a very short time. Doing that requires more than knowledge of your proposals.

If you have thousands of very useful data to support your claims, choosing the right data to present to support your ideas is very difficult. As already indicated, your five minute presentation could make or break your career.

The Title and Ask Trick

One of the best ways to keep your presentation short but information packed is to concentrate on a topic. The title of your presentation should help you limit your topic to certain areas.

For example, you do not just say on your presentation, “How to Improve Productivity.” With that title, you could be talking about productivity for 2 days and still not exhaust the topic. Make it a little bit longer such as, “How to Improve Productivity on Pressure.” These simple two words “on pressure” will help you concentrate on pressure packed workplace. Although it is still a broad idea, you have trimmed it down to controllable environment.

Starting Strong

Five minutes is a short time to get everyone interested in your presentation. Five minutes can just be enough for an introduction for others. Since you only have limited time in getting the message across, start strong.   You can do this by providing highly compelling facts or a story that will become the background of everything. Make sure that the story is short enough (less than a minute) to get everything started. If you get things started on a strong note, the rest would be very easy.

Practice

The only way any professional could be great in what they do is when they practice. No one can just enter the room full of other professionals and impress them without any preparation. Write down your speech and possibly memorize it.

Carefully prepare your data and practice your presentation until you get everything without any stutter or pause. Remember, you only have five minutes but that five minutes could be the ticket to a great career.