how long to prepare a 15 minute presentation

15-Minute Presentations: Design, Write & Deliver

Hrideep barot.

• Presentation , Public Speaking

One of the most popular sorts of presentations is the 15-minute presentation. 15 minutes are ideal for practically every situation. You have enough time to delve further into your topic, ask questions, and summarise your objective without taking up too much of your audience’s time. It is swift and dependable. It is, however, quite easy to do it wrong. Use this article to help you improve your style of writing and deliver the perfect 15-minute presentation.

How many Slides to include in a 15-Minute Presentation?

How many words to include in a 15-minute presentation, planning the 15-minute presentation, how to prepare for a 15-minute presentation.

• Structuring the 15-minute Presentation

Designing the Presentation

Delivering a 15-minute presentation, ending the 15-minute presentation, 15-minute presentation tips for job interviews, key tips for a 15-minute presentation, topics for 15-minute presentations.

The issue of the number of slides becomes less significant when you begin to lengthen your presentation. You can thus add more slides when calculating the number of slides for a 15-minute presentation. You might perhaps utilise up to 20.

For Speeches or Business Conferences

Aiming for one slide every 45-50 seconds in a presentation helps you to look knowledgeable and competent without offering too much or too little information. The objective is to keep your audience interested in your message and in the common results.

One concept per slide is another suggestion. You may concentrate on the most important details, demonstrate your subject-matter knowledge, and convey knowledge and awareness to your audience by presenting only one topic on each slide.

The rule of thumb of one slide every 45 to 60 seconds is not rigid, though. There may be quick slides and slower slides. You may alternatively stay with fewer slides and devote more time to discussing the critical issues. In other words, just make minor changes to the spoken portion of your presentation.

You may go beyond the basic strategy if you desire to go for extra slides. That implies that in addition to providing slides for your key talking points, you may also include slides for your arguments.

For Scientific Presentations

Give each slide two to three minutes, giving a total of 5-7 slides, not counting the envelope (the “title”, “end and questions?” slides and certain images in between). In a classic blueprint, there are around 4 actual content slides, including 1 for topic specification and 2 for introduction, motivation, and background. The body should have everything it needs, but it shouldn’t take up more than four slides, with at least one of those slides reserved for a specific example.

Of course, you can take your own approach to this and edit it as per your content. If you have a lot of information to break down, increase your slides and help your audience understand everything clearly. Add exciting example slides and bring the research down to easier terms.

Daphne Gray-Grant, a speech and publishing coach, discovered that humans talk at a pace of 125 to 150 words per minute. Therefore, a 15-minute speech utilises between 1,875 and 2,250 words. It is nearly always preferable to talk slowly rather than rapidly. So stick to the lower end of the scale. If left unchecked, you may speak for a lot longer than intended. 

Once you’ve gained some speaking expertise, try to avoid giving word-for-word presentations unless you already have a teleprompter. If you talk from outlines or notes instead of a script, your presentation will be more intriguing and authentic. 

You can memorise an introduction to help you get started, but the remainder should be done with an outline. A few blunders are acceptable if they help you enhance your delivery. Your capacity to be intriguing and engaging with the audience will compensate for any little flaws.

Never deliver a presentation without a clear goal in mind. If you don’t have a clear goal for your presentation, even if it’s very engaging, the audience will leave without using the information.

The content and structure of your presentation are guided by the purpose when it is connected to an outcome. Your graphics and all of your verbal content should be directed toward a single, distinct goal. the action you want them to take. You’ll be an effective presenter if you can achieve that objective and cut out unnecessary fluff.

The adage “Keep things Short and Simple” is pretty useful. If you prepare a lengthy presentation, it will be even better than in a case. When you write down your speech, read it aloud several times, cross out any unnecessary words, and then only use short, concise sentences with no ambiguity.

Keep in mind that your speech must be a lot shorter when you practise at home. To our loved ones, including ourselves in the mirror, we always communicate more clearly. Since there will likely be a large audience and there may occasionally be technological difficulties, you should prepare extensively and limit the length of your presentation to considerably less than 15 minutes.

Try covering all the points in 10 minutes , this will give you more than enough time to make up for any unforeseen circumstances. 

Consider yourself one of the attendees. You attend the presentation and pay money. What are the chances that the outcomes of this meeting or event will satisfy you (them)? Examine each and every prepared slide; see every word. How may it appear to your audience? Will they comprehend the details of what you plan to tell them? Do they get information, an impression, or interest from your slides? Don’t finish your preparation without answering these questions first.

If you have no time to prepare, watch this video to learn how to give the best speech you can without preparation.

How Long Does it Take to Prepare a 15-Minute Presentation?

For a 15 Minute presentation, the advantage you have is that you roughly know who you are presenting to, and it frequently ends with time for questions and discussion. You are typically aware of the presentation well in advance, sometimes two weeks or more. You are now in a good position since you can truly schedule how you will utilise your time up until the birth.

If at all feasible, begin your preparations at least two weeks before to the seminar. Although you shouldn’t spend the next two weeks working only on your presentation, you should start early enough to ease the pressure off and give yourself time to think about what you want to say.

The first week can be spent completely on research and preparation for the topic. Make a rough blueprint of what you want to say and don’t worry about the delivery just yet. Get the ideas down on paper.

In the second week , start working on how you want to deliver the presentation. You will need to work on the content and crucially on the slides. Formatting graphs and charts take a lot longer than first thought, so give it enough time. Focus on getting your message across.

You’ll have enough time to process the presentation and relax if you finish it two or three days before your presentation. It relaxes anxiety and allows for a last-minute rehearsal.

Finally, these are ideal timetables. Depending on how you prepare, it might take a lot less or a lot more time. These are just the guidelines that have been shown to be the most beneficial.

Structuring the 15-minute Presentation.

Introduction : Because you don’t have a lot of time here, this might be one of the most difficult portions of a discussion. Include all important details to take your viewers on a journey through your data. This is where knowing your audience comes in handy: it will offer you an excellent starting point for what level to start at.

Content : The most crucial aspect of your presentation is the content. Make your remarks as clear and simple as possible. Include no unnecessary information. This will be the longest portion of your presentation, so make the most of it. For a study or research, tell the audience only what is important to the data you are displaying.

Summary : During your presentation, if you have 5 essential points, you should have five distinct interpretations of your results. Your summary will just be a reiteration of these interpretations and nothing more. 

There are no concrete rules to designing presentations. However, there are a few guidelines that people choose from, such as the 6×6 rule, 7×7 rule, etc. The 6×6 rule makes the most sense to us. According to these presentation guidelines, each slide should have no more than six bullet points and no more than six words on each line. This guideline is intended to keep your slides from being so text-heavy and crowded that viewers won’t want to look at them. It can seem like a good concept in principle, but it’s not as simple as it appears.

Your primary goal should be to communicate your important arguments as clearly as possible . While it’s true that you don’t want to lose people with text-heavy slides, there are situations when explaining your argument in six words or fewer is simply not possible. You end up reducing and twisting the material to the point that your message is lost when you attempt. This is not to say that the 6×6 Rule should never be adopted; rather, it is to explain why it should not be forced all of the time.

Introductory Slides

This would be the very basic slide of your presentation, which would include the title of your presentation, alongside a subtitle that could include your name, your company name, or your tagline.

Follow this up with an index slide which describes what you are going to talk about throughout the presentation.

Content Slides

These are the heaviest slides of your presentation. These slides would contain all your information, graphs, charts, and images. In order to get your point across in the best way possible, these slides need to look good. Avoid creating any sort of clutter by following the 6×6 rule explained above, but also remember to not force it.

Avoid using showy transitions like text fly-ins. These features may appear spectacular at first, but they rapidly become distracting and tiresome. Check that the slides are legible from the back row seats. Text and graphics should be large enough to be read but not so huge that they look “loud.”

Conclusion Slides

These are the final slides of your presentation. It is very important for you to have a summary slide here, as it serves as a reminder of all the important points that you made in the presentation. Lay all the points out individually and recap them. Additionally, add a thank you slide here if you think you need one. For more information about saying thank you at the end of a presentation, check out this article.

Start Strong

You may begin with a story to illustrate why your topic is important. For example, if the topic is the benefits of meditation for psychological wellbeing, you may tell a story of a friend or someone else whose mental health improved dramatically after learning to meditate. This story is more likely to elicit an emotional response and be remembered by the listeners than a list of points.

2. Attention-Grabbing Statements

Attention-grabbing statements evoke an immediate reaction from the listener, whether they are favourable or controversial.

When delivered enthusiastically, agreeable phrases motivate the audience to agree with the presentation and begin with a positive attitude.

Provocative statements bring about a feeling of shock in the audience. This shock prompts individuals to pay closer attention to the presentation since it is something new to them. However, be certain that your shock has the right impact; you want the audience to stay involved because they appreciated the surprise or found it intriguing, not because you offended them.

3. A Question

You may elicit thought and interest from your audience by posing questions throughout your presentation. There are two distinct categories of queries: Direct and Rhetorical.

Direct questions warrant a response: “Why are people turning vegan?”. The audience is cognitively stimulated by these. You may pass the mic around and ask the crowd to come up with the answer you want, or just let the audience ponder by themselves.

Rhetorical questions don’t really require replies and are frequently used to highlight a concept or point, for example, “What’s in a name?”

These aren’t the only ways to begin a presentation, but they are the strongest or most widely used ones. Find what works best for you by experimenting with various methods and getting as much experience as you can. If you have a strong introduction planned, the rest of your presentation will go much more smoothly.

Delivering the Content

1. using the three-point outline, for data heavy presentations.

For data-related or scientific presentations, you have only a few minutes to convey your crucial points. Try limiting your key points to only 3. Any more would be hard to squeeze in this short span but can be done if it is not too heavy. Make the points short and precise. Don’t include any unnecessary information. Make the most of this time because it will be the longest section of your speech. Tell the audience only the information about your experimental design that is pertinent to the results you are displaying.

For Content Heavy Presentations

The purpose of the Three-Point Outline is to break up your major information into three memorable portions. Although you are free to add more, having three points makes it slightly simpler for listeners to remember the information and to keep the conversation moving. This is because this format perfectly utilises the rule of three, about which you can learn more here .

2. Using Jokes and Stories

Just like how we can use a story to start a presentation, we can use it to deliver our key points. People enjoy hearing stories. Stories are easy to recall. However, every story must have a message, so make sure yours does too. Whether you’re elaborating on a project, describing a technical issue, or pitching your services, storytelling is essential for capturing the attention of your audience. Top executives are making the most out of it. Make it the centrepiece of your interview presentation. For instance, Sara Blakely, creator of Spanx, uses storytelling to describe how she produced a successful product in the video below.

For using jokes, it’s acceptable to be funny if you’re actually funny. Don’t attempt it in a talk if you aren’t. Be naturally amusing rather than trying to be so. Finally, quotes are lasting and serve as excellent points of recall. If a quote can assist you in making your argument, use it.

Be confident and organised so that you can concentrate on the larger picture. What actions did you take, why did you take them, and what lessons have you learnt as a result? The audience is not concerned with all the specifics. Keep in mind that if you can’t summarise it within a few phrases, it’s too difficult. You can follow this outline to get an idea of how to conclude. Any of these points can be skipped, but they’re all important in their own rights.

1. Asking for Questions

To ensure that the audience understands your ideas, provide time for clarifying questions. Then move forward to the conclusion of the conversation. A dialogue based on misinterpretations is not what you need. If possible, include a message that the audience can take home. 

3. Summarising key Points

If you are faster than you thought you would have been, say a quick summary or recap of your points to drive your points home. Out of the last 15 Minutes, the presentation can be 12 Minutes with the rest reserved for recap or questions.

3. Concluding statements:

The final statements are very important to your presentation. They define the memory the audience takes back home with them. They can be of several kinds, here are a few useful ones:

A Call-To-Action(CTA)

A persuasive speech ends with a call to action, in which you urge the audience to take some action once they have finished listening to you. The CTA assigns audience members certain duties to fulfil and leaves them with a sense of determination.

A quote does wonders for stressing your argument. To make sure that they really are appropriate to both you and your audience, you might want to look for quotes from popular people in history or media. Make sure the quotation you select is pertinent to the subject of your presentation and will be memorable to your audience.

A Thought-Provoking Question

An excellent method to guarantee that your audience will remember your presentation for a long time is to pose a thought-provoking question to them. The query must be relevant to the issue at hand. Your audience will think about the answers after hearing them in your presentation.

To perfect your style of ending, here is an article that talks about the various issues to avoid while ending your presentation, and what to do instead!

Aim for around 6-10 slides and make each one brief and meaningful. This guarantees that the material you present is memorable and will help you stand out from the crowd of interviews.

Some interviewers may even set you a time restriction for your presentation; make sure you consider this and don’t go over it, otherwise you’ll look to have bad time management abilities.

Instead of creating paragraphs of text, use bullet points and font size of no less than 24.

Know your audience

Before presenting a 15-minute business presentation, a person must first understand his or her audience.  For example, if someone is presenting himself to a possible employer during a job interview, he may conduct a background study on the hiring manager on LinkedIn. The manager’s alma mater or prior jobs might be fantastic conversation starters.

Prior understanding of the audience may also help a person avoid making a bad first impression. If, while presenting to senior management, he discovers that the manager is a straight shooter with little time for pleasantries, he might alter his presentation to eliminate any extraneous details.

Use Visuals

Including graphics in your presentation is a tried-and-true formula. Our brains are programmed to pay greater attention to visual material, and around 65% of people are visual learners. However, these are not the only reasons why you should use graphics in your presentation.

Visuals draw the audience’s attention and improve your performance. Visuals help your audience absorb difficult topics more quickly. They pique your audience’s interest and elicit an emotional response, giving your words more impact and keep your discourse on the topic. To describe key ideas, you can utilise video, photos, infographics, and symbols alongside map charts and statistics maps that can aid in the visualisation of geographical data.

Face your audience : Don’t show your back to your audience, show your face.  Know all of your slides by heart. Know your tale like the back of your hand and don’t even bother looking at the slides.

Repeat key points : You must repeat your points at least three times: once in the introduction, once when you make them, and once more in your conclusion. It may appear unnecessarily repetitive to you, but not to your viewers. Because they are not documenting the presentation, the audience can forget or miss anything.

Show your enthusiasm : Enthusiasm is noticeable. Boredom is also very noticeable. Do not propose your topic if you are not enthused about it. Keep your energy up all the way through the presentation. Don’t give your audience a chance to lose interest. 

Respect Time : The most obvious but crucial point is that a 15-minute presentation should always be kept to 15 minutes. Any longer, the crowd becomes irritated and begins to check their watches. They lose interest in the topic and forget the core elements. Always keep track of the time.

For College Students

• The methods used globally to combat unemployment.
• Understanding the Pride Movement.
• The advantages of alternate energy sources.
• The concept of the Global Internet
• The development of the contemporary film.
• Strategies to make higher education free for everybody.
• Gentrification: what is it?
• The European Union: What Is It?
• The advantages of diversity in the workplace.
• Describing Sharia law.
• Greek mythology in contemporary media.
• What you should know about COVID-19

For Funny Presentations

• Grades are not that useful.
• A comprehensive guide to using icebreakers.
• Three signs that show you are addicted to BuzzFeed quizzes.
• Nobody is ever “too busy”.
• How to smile and wave when someone offends you.
• What would your pet say if it could talk?
• Evidence that we are living in a simulation.
• Ways to definitively clean your room.
• How to lie effectively.
• Why are successful songs so catchy?

Consider your favourite movies. They often have fast and slow, loud and quiet sections, and they elicit various emotions in you. The same is required of presentations.

Be deliberate in how you present yourself. Slides that inspire will move and engage your audience. It’s fantastic if you are self-assured and your message is clear, irrespective of the number of slides. It all boils down to giving the presentation your best shot while still accomplishing the presentation’s objectives.

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Tress Academic

#11: How much time is needed to prepare a good scientific presentation?

May 21, 2019 by Tress Academic

Do you have to give a scientific presentation at a conference or at your institute, and wonder when you need to start preparing it? How early should you begin to work on your talk to be able to deliver it well? Will one or two days be enough? Should you spend a week or more? Let us give you some guidance on how much time it takes to prepare for five different types of scientific presentations. 

If you ask other colleagues at your institute, you will probably hear all sorts of advice: Some start working very early on their presentation, others a week before and some just the day before. You might also hear that some people don’t prepare their talks at all. So it can sometimes be tricky to get meaningful advice on how much time is really needed for preparing a presentation. 

Years ago, we had a special experience that changed our approach to the time needed for preparing a conference talk. We were on the plane with some colleagues from our institute on our way to a large conference overseas. We all were going to present at the conference, otherwise the institute would not cover the expenses for the journey and the conference. Next to us on the aircraft sat a colleague, a well-known scientist, working on his laptop during the flight. While everybody else was taking a rest on the long journey, he looked very busy with his laptop. We saw he was working with PowerPoint and copying and pasting loads of text and images onto slides that he created on the go. 

After a while we realised what our colleague was working on: It was the slides of the presentation that he was supposed to deliver a day later at the conference. He literally started with the preparation of his talk on the way to the conference. As he told us, he hadn’t done any preparation before. Thus he sat on the plane and was doing the work others, including us, had done before we went on the journey. 

The next day, he presented his on-the-plane-crafted talk. If you had been at this talk you would understand what a jumble it was. It was not one of those presentations that you would remember for long. It just looked like a collection of slides and an accumulation of content bits that were sewn together. Well that’s in fact what he had done on the plane next to us! Have you also observed something similar like we did years ago?

We decided after this lesson on the plane, that whenever we start our journey to a place where we have to present, our presentation is completed and rehearsed BEFORE we get on the plane. But of course, to do so requires some time set aside for the preparation of your talk a good deal in advance! So, if you are also not keen on being under pressure during the journey to complete your presentation and have no time to properly rehearse it, then keep on reading. 

To avoid the stress of preparation at the last-minute, use our following suggestions to help you assess when to start with your preparation and set yourself deadlines for these tasks. For how to deal properly with deadlines and avoid getting down to the wire, best check our post #8 called  “Deadline disaster: Seven easy steps to avoid” . 

In this post here, we will tell you here how much time you should plan for preparing a scientific presentation. We give you advice for the five types of presentations that you might have to deal with, including conferences. The particular occasion, event, and importance of your upcoming presentation influences how much time you would need to prepare and deliver a talk well. 

1) Ad-hoc presentations 

An ad-hoc presentation is a presentation that was not planned ahead of time before you have to deliver it. What could that be? Imagine a situation like this: Your boss comes in your office, not alone, but with a guest visitor who is at your institute for a day or two. Your boss wants to inform the visitor about the research that’s going on at your institute and introduce a few staff members. Your boss and the visitor come in your office and your boss asks you whether you could briefly tell the visitor something about your research. 

An ad-hoc presentation is a difficult task. There is no time to prepare anything. It often comes as a total surprise. You may think, obviously there is nothing you can do regarding the preparation of an ad-hoc presentation because of the lack of time. Yes and no!

You are right, it’s too late to start preparing it once you’ve been asked to deliver. So, what about preparing yourself for such a situation before it actually happens? Wouldn’t it make a splendid impression on the visitor (and your boss) if you could say that you have something you can show them? Especially if you have actually something that you prepared weeks ago for just such a situation. 

In an ad-hoc presentation, you are not expected to talk for 15 minutes and have a stellar slideshow to go along with it. No, you talk probably for 3-5 minutes and the content is all about what you are doing at the moment. So how can you prepare for this occasion? 

Once you have a quiet afternoon, sit down and block 60 minutes to think about what you could tell in 3-5 minutes about your work so that other people would get an impression of your work. Ideally, you could make a short outline of keywords on one page and have one or two visuals ready to show. You could also create a short slideshow with 3-5 slides where you put the main keywords and visuals, to guide you and to show to somebody. Have the outline always at hand in your drawer or keep the mini-presentation on your laptop or even on your mobile phone so you can always access it. All of this can be done a  good time in advance. It doesn’t take a lot of time to prepare. It is far better to have this mini-presentation than to be totally surprised and unprepared, and we bet it will help you make a good impression! 

2) Last-minute presentations 

A last-minute presentation can be similar to the ad-hoc one but the difference is that there might be a short time to prepare before you actually have to deliver it. Imagine a situation like this: Your institute is hosting a mini-conference with project partners where you inform each other about the ongoing research. A scheduled presenter took ill and suddenly there is one presentation slot left for this afternoon. Your boss or the PI of the project approaches you, and asks whether you could jump in and present in the afternoon. 

This is again a bit a difficult situation. You are probably expected to present for about 10 minutes, so it has to be more substantial. Again, you are expected to present your own work and you don’t need to squeeze it or make it fit into one specific context. At least, you have a bit of time before you present. Your presentation is not immediately taking place, but you might also be expected to fill a whole slot. Thus, it can feel even more stressful to be in such a situation compared to the ad-hoc presentation. You probably have a few hours left to prepare – better than nothing – but if you have nothing to fall back on, the next hours will be stressful (and you probably had planned to spend them differently). 

So how could you prepare for such a presentation? There is a 2-step approach that can help you here: The first step is done in advance of an anticipated request for a last-minute presentation. The second step will fill some of the time from when you receive the request until the talk is to be held. 

• In step 1: Allocate an afternoon, about 3-4 h to think about the structure and content of a presentation of your research lasting about 10 minutes. Make a short presentation and use 5-8 slides. It can be something linked to the last conference presentation you did, or it can of course also build the skeleton for your next conference presentation. Spend some of the afternoon outlining a meaningful presentation aim and structure, make sure there is a message, create some slides to support you in your delivery and use at least half an hour to rehearse two or three times to see whether it all fits together. Keep this presentation skeleton ready to take it out once you need it. 
• In step 2: Depending on how much time you can spend on this step before you have to present, you use about 2 h to go through your presentation skeleton and update it, adjust it and rehearse it for the afternoon presentation. 

3) A research seminar presentation

This is typically a 15-20 minutes in-house presentation in front of your colleagues, other staff members, a graduate school meeting etc. You will – more or less – know the audience you are presenting to and you are expected to give a report on your own research progress. It is often followed up with questions and discussion time of about the same length. 

In contrast to the ad-hoc and the last-minute presentation, the research seminar presentation is not a surprise event. You know about it usually a good time in advance, often two weeks or more. This puts you in a better situation, as you can actually plan the use of your time until the delivery.  

If possible, start at least two weeks before the seminar with your preparation. Of course, you are not expected to work the whole next two weeks only on your presentation, but to start so early that it keeps the pressure low and gives you time to reflect on what you want to present: 

• The first week is used to brainstorm ideas, get them onto paper, and probably make a rough outline of how the talk should be structured. 
• The second week is used to work more intensely on the content, the message, the slides and any other tools you want to use, as well as rehearsing your talk. 

If complete the whole thing two days before you present, you’ll have enough time to digest the talk and relax. It calms down nerves and gives you time for a last minute rehearsal. 

4) A conference presentation

A conference presentation is similar to the research seminar presentation with a few major differences: The audience is typically larger, you won’t know most of the audience, they won’t know you, and the presentation takes place somewhere else, not at your institute. 

Most likely, you will present for 15 minutes at an international conference and your talk will be held in a parallel session, i.e. one of several sessions running parallel to each other, typically sorted thematically. Audience numbers within the sessions and across sessions can vary. 

Now, most of the conferences are planned long in advance and you have to register your talk approximately 3-9 months prior to the event. Hence, there is ample preparation time – in theory – because many presenters, at the time they register for the conference, do not yet know what they are going to present later. 

In terms of the impact of your presentation, this presentation type is probably the most important one. Therefore, give it enough time for proper preparation. If possible, start 4-6 weeks before the conference to plan and prepare your talk. Get an idea of what you want to present and what you will need to do it well. Then, make sure you still have enough time to get the results, the data, the visuals or anything else you might need. 

Over the next few weeks, make a schedule for where you can work in sessions totalling up to one day per week on the presentation. You will have other duties to do as well and therefore, it might not be possible to spend more time on this task per week. For example, in those 4-5 weeks, you can spend the time like this: 

• in one session you work on the message and the overall structure, 
• in one session you develop and outline the content, 
• in one session you create slides and visuals, 
• and in one session you think about the way you want to deliver it and rehearse your presentation. 

Have your conference presentation completely prepared at least one week before you go to the conference. This will give you enough time to reflect on it, let it mature and have a few last-minute rehearsals. By the way, some conference organisers even want you to submit your presentation in advance, so it is handy to have it ready a week before. It takes away some of the pressure and stress! 

5) A really important solo presentation

The last presentation type is a special occasion. It can be a short lecture on your research, a talk for your PhD defence, an invited lecture, a keynote presentation at a conference or a presentation during a job talk. What they all have in common is that you will know about these presentations a good time prior to  having to deliver them, only a presentation at a job talk can sometimes be on shorter notice (2-4 weeks before). 

It is also common that the audience comes specifically to hear you to deliver this talk. It is about the content, but also very much about you as a person. You might be the only presenter at the occasion or you will be a presenter with a special, prominent status. The presentation time can also be a bit longer than with the other types listed above: anything between 15-45 minutes. However, these kinds of presentations take place a bit more seldom. 

To deliver well and to avoid any stress in the run-up to the event, start early with the preparation. We recommend to begin at least 6 weeks prior to the talk. Depending on the expected length of the presentation, you will need to spend a bit more time on selecting the right content and organising it to fit the specific purpose. Since most of the solo or keynote presentations are invited talks, the audience, the conference organisers or the selection committee expect you to cover some specific content. 

Hence, in this presentation you will most likely not just tell what you do in your research, but those inviting you for the talk have specific intentions for it. They want to hear something extra and this might require quite some extra work for you to prepare. 

Again, we recommend to complete your preparation about a week before delivery. You might need to spend a bit more time in the run-up period for this presentation than for a regular conference presentation, depending on the length and purpose of the expected talk. In addition to sessions totalling up to one day per week, you might need a week where you work a bit more intensively on the presentation, spending up to two or three days. 

Don’t forget to calculate enough time for the rehearsal of the talk. All eyes of the audience will be on you. You have their full attention and they want to see not only WHAT you present but also HOW you deliver it. Particularly in job talks, this is a vital component of such a presentation. 

Conclusion: 

A presentation is a unique opportunity to present your work and yourself. Read more about the potential impact of a presentation in our contribution “Why your next presentation matters!” It will give you all the motivation why it might be meaningful to invest a bit more time because a good presentation can be a big win for you. 

How much time YOU effectively invest into preparing your next presentation depends largely on two aspects: 

• The occasion and the purpose of the presentation. 
• Your personal level of experience with giving presentations. 

Good presentations are not given by magicians or super humans. Behind every good presentation that you see, there was simply a necessary amount of preparation time that went into it. Don’t believe all those who pretend that they never spend much time on preparing a talk, unless of course they indeed deliver poorly and then the presentation is proof of their claim. 

There are only a few speakers around who are gifted enough to deliver well with a tiny amount of preparation. If you do not belong to this group, we highly recommend you to invest time in preparation. Professional presenters make everything look so easy as if it were effortless. Believe us, they invested time to make it look like this and that’s why they are professionals. 

Think about what you want to get out of the presentation and to whom you are presenting, it will help you to determine the amount of time that is needed. Good luck with your next talk!

Relevant resources:  

• Smart Academics Blog #7: Why your next presentation matters 
• Smart Academics Blog #8: Deadline disaster: Seven easy steps to avoid
• Smart Academics Blog #26: First conference presentation? 17 life-saving tips
• Smart Academics Blog #44: What to present from your PhD study when you don’t have a lot to show yet?
• Expert guide: 6 reasons why presentations can fail 

More information:  

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