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Your presentation skills directly affect the success of your sales pitches and perhaps your future promotion. Therefore, staying on top of your presentation game should be among your priorities.
One of the best ways to stay sharp and expand your presentation arsenal is to invest in quality online presentation skills training. Let’s take a look at some of the finest online presentation courses out there and how to choose the right one for you.
Quick Look: Best Presentation Skills Courses
- Storytelling with Data - Get this course
- Presentation Skills for Beginners - Get this course
- Business Presentation Skills – Excellence Made Easy - Get this course
- Intermediate MS Excel – Workbook Presentation and Printing - Get this course
- Effective Executive Presentation Skills - Get this course
- Presentation Skills – Advanced: Speak without Reading Notes - Get this course
- PowerPoint 2016 Advanced - Get this course
- Deliver Money-Making Presentations: Put Power in Your Pitch - Get this course
- The Complete Presentation and Public Speaking/Speech Course - Get this course
What Makes Great Online Presentation Skills Training?
When looking for the right online presentation skills course, there are many things to consider. Chief among them are the instructor’s knowledge and reputation, skills taught in the course, and the prices/value. Here is a word or two on each of the key considerations.
Instructor’s knowledge and reputation
An online presentation skills training course is an investment into your skill set and your future. Therefore, you should make it a priority to investigate the reputation and knowledge of the instructor.
Look into their previous experience in the field and their reputation among their peers. You should also take a look at what their former students have to say about them and their courses.
Specific skills taught
Since presentation is a vast subject, you should determine exactly what you need from a course. Maybe you’re not a very confident speaker or you have trouble writing your script. Perhaps your MS Excel and PowerPoint skills are not up to par or your presentations lack a powerful message and a compelling call to action.
There are also instances where you may not know what you need to work on, which happens more often than most people think. Browsing online courses on this topic might just give you the right ideas.
Training cost
Finally, you should consider the price of the training. Compare as many courses as you can to make sure you don’t pay too much for the training. On the other hand, this will also help you weed out suspiciously cheap courses by instructors who promise miracles and overnight success.
The Best Online Presentation Skills Training
The following online presentation skills courses were selected based on the criteria explained above. For this presentation, they’re arranged under beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses in ascending order of the cost.
Best Online Presentation Skills Training for Beginners
New to presenting and searching for foundational skills? Consider one of these courses.
1. Storytelling with Data
- Who's it for? Beginners
- Price: On sale
Many people tend to forget most details in a presentation. If you want to make your presentations compelling and memorable, check out Storytelling with Data.
This course is among Udemy’s most popular Presentation Skills classes. It has an average rating of 4.1 stars from over 600 ratings and more than 3,600 enrolled students.
Throughout this course, you’ll learn how to present data in an engaging way, develop your arsenal of presentation strategies, and tell stories in the 5-stage arc. The course consists of 2 hours of video lessons and 1 article. The enrollment fee is $19.99.
2. Presentation Skills for Beginners
- Who's it for? Beginners
- Price: On Sale
Good oral presentation skills are immensely valuable and can help you climb the corporate ladder. If this sounds good to you, feel free to check out the Presentation Skills for Beginners course on Udemy.
This course was created by TJ Walker and has been updated for 2019. The average rating of this course is 4.1 stars from over 80 ratings. More than 8,000 students have attended the course since its inception.
The course is made up of 60 minutes of online video lessons and 2 articles. Main topics include delivering competent presentations, influencing the crowd, giving memorable messages, and being confident during presentations. The course costs $49.99 and you also get a certificate of completion at the end.
3. Business Presentation Skills – Excellence Made Easy
- Who's it for? Beginners
- Price: On Sale
With Business Presentation Skills – Excellence Made Easy, you’ll learn fundamental business presentation skills, how to give effective and confident presentations, and persuade listeners to take action. The course was created by Richard Lock and you can find it on Udemy.
This course has a stellar rating of 4.5 stars from more than 300 ratings. Thus far, more than 2,600 people have enrolled. The last update of the course happened in 2018.
The syllabus consists of 2.5 hours of online instruction videos, 11 articles, 1 minute of online audio instructions, and 14 downloadable resources. The full price of the course is $94.99. You also have Udemy’s standard 30-day money-back guarantee if you decide to enroll.
Best Intermediate Online Presentation Skills Training
If you have presentation experience, you may find the following courses useful.
1. Intermediate MS Excel – Workbook Presentation and Printing
- Who's it for? Intermediates
- Price: On Sale
Microsoft Excel is still the most useful tool for presenting complex data and sales figures. If you’d like to build on your MS Excel skills, you might want to take a look at Intermediate MS Excel – Workbook Presentation and Printing on Udemy.
In this course, Jed Guinto details how to format your MS Excel presentations, wrap text, format text, set up headers and footers, scale pages, print your presentations, apply horizontal and vertical text justification, merge cells, control images, and more.
The course has been around since 2015 and it has an average rating of 4.3 stars from almost 100 ratings. More than 5,600 people have taken this course. The syllabus consists of 60 minutes of video lessons, 1 downloadable resource, and 4 articles.
2. Effective Executive Presentation Skills
- Who's it for? Intermediates
- Price: On Sale
Good presentation skills are essential for executives and those hoping to advance to the top ranks. The Effective Executive Presentation Skills course on Udemy can help you up your presentation game and increase your advancement prospects.
Blair Cook of Illumeo Learning created this course several years ago. It was last updated in August 2017 and currently has an average rating of 4.2 stars from over 170 ratings. More than 1,000 students have attended this course. The enrollment fee is $74.99.
The course includes 90 minutes of video lessons, 2 downloadable resources, and 2 articles. The major topics covered are developing and organizing the content of your presentations, spotting the inspiring elements in your presentations, creating rapport and credibility with the audience, and delivering key messages in a clear and powerful way.
3. Presentation Skills – Advanced: Speak without Reading Notes
- Who's it for? Intermediates
- Price: On Sale
Many presenters, politicians, and executives depend heavily on scripts, PowerPoint panels, and printed bullet points during their presentations. This may end up greatly diminishing their effectiveness and performance. If you’d like to learn how to go off-script, you might want to check out this course on Udemy.
It was created by TJ Walker and has been updated for 2019. The course has an average rating of 4.5 stars and more than 14,000 enrolled students.
The syllabus contains 41 minutes of video lessons, 3 downloadable resources, and 4 articles. The enrollment fee is $199.99.
Best Advanced Online Presentation Skills Training
Are you an experienced presenter? These courses will enhance your presentation skills.
1. PowerPoint 2016 Advanced
- Who's it for? Advanced
- Price: On Sale
PowerPoint is an essential tool for presenters even as some major companies have moved away from it. The PowerPoint 2016 Advanced course on Udemy can help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge if it’s your company’s de facto presentation app.
The $39.99 course is among the most popular advanced PowerPoint courses. The average rating is 4.3 stars from 260 ratings and more than 1,500 people have taken the course thus far.
In this course, you’ll learn the proper use of transitions and animations as well as some advanced features. You will also learn how to work with templates, themes, masters, advanced media, slide shows, and graphical features. The syllabus consists of 5 hours of video lessons, 1 practice test, and 1 downloadable resource.
2. Deliver Money-Making Presentations: Put Power in Your Pitch
- Who's it for? Advanced
- Price: On Sale
Your ability to make a pitch needs to be at its absolute best for high-profile presentations. Deliver Money-Making Presentations: Put Power in Your Pitch can help you with that.
The course is one of Udemy’s highest rated courses on the subject as evidenced by its average rating of 4.9 stars from over 150 ratings. More than 2,300 students have taken the course.
You will learn how to grab your audience’s attention right from the get-go, make a great first impression, deliver your message in a compelling way, avoid common presentation pitfalls, manage mistakes, anxiety, and disruptions, and so on.
The $99.99 course is made up of 120 minutes of video lessons, 8 downloadable resources, and 8 articles.
3. The Complete Presentation and Public Speaking/Speech Course
- Who's it for? Advanced
- Price: On Sale
This course covers the entire process of public speaking from the first draft to the finer points of the actual presentation. It is Udemy’s best-selling course on the subject with nearly 50,000 enrolled students. The average rating is an impressive 4.5 stars out of almost 5,000 ratings.
The course includes 16 hours of video lessons, 307 downloadable resources, and 30 articles. As you might know, Udemy now offers auto-generated subtitles in English, French, and six other languages. The full price of the course is $199.99.
Presenting Yourself in the Best Light
Your presentation skills can be the key to your next promotion. Regardless, it is not something that can be mastered overnight but more of a product of continuous learning and practice. While you can’t go wrong with any of the above classes, don’t hesitate to use them as a starting to continue your search.
Want to read more on professional development? Check out Benzinga's guides to the best business management courses, affiliate marketing training and entrepreneur courses.
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