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O P I N I O N
F rom PowerPoint and Keynote to Prezi and boards, visuals are an important element of almost every AEC interview. Done well, they exemplify that “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Done poorly and another saying comes to mind: “Death by PowerPoint.” Power (pain) point There’s nothing wrong with using visuals in your presentation, but you must remember that you’re the star, not the slide show.
Scott Johnston GUEST SPEAKER
Here are seven tips to make sure your visuals help, not hurt: 1)Build content, then visuals. To save time, teams often start with an existing deck and material they already have. Often this causes a team to lose the connection with the client to which they are present- ing. Develop the content first, then the visuals to support it. 2)You’re the star. Teams often build an amazing PowerPoint deck and then spend the bulk of the in- terview going through it slide by slide. The problem is that the client isn’t hiring your deck. They’re hir- ing you – and not to build a PowerPoint deck. Your visual aid needs to do work you can’t do yourself. That powerful graphic that shows time saved thanks
to your unique pre-construction estimating process? Thumbs up. The three bullet points you cut and past- ed from your marketing brochure about how great your firm is? Thumbs down. 3)Avoid the splat! The single biggest mistake we at Johnston Training Group see when helping teams prepare for interviews is that a slide comes up without any kind of introduction. Now the panel is trying to figure out what the slide is while you’re explaining it to them. The result? They get neither. Here’s an example of a how to avoid the splat: (No slide yet) “Now I’m going to show you how we saved $100,000 on a recent project.” (Click – an image of an estimating process comes up and you pause.)
See SCOTT JOHNSTON, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER November 6, 2017, ISSUE 1223
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