The essence of effective presentation skills in engineering education

Employers/Industry is demanding graduates with excellent presentation skills. Globalization has brought dramatic changes in engineering workplace and it demands new skills and knowledge of engineering graduates to be fit in this competitive work environment of organization. For engineer, work place communication expectations are multifold as a result of globalization and rapid technology advancement as engineers are expected to communicate “with international partners”. Engineers of 21st ^centaury need to possess an adequate knowledge and understanding of professional community perception of effective communicative competence in “presentation skills”. Technical oral presentations are frequently practiced workplace communicative event. Thus, a student´s presentation in the class room becomes an important element, in delivering positive learning experiences. The main objective of this paper is, to improve presentation skills and to train students to talk to a group of people, and aims at investigating barriers that hinder effective oral presentation performance of engineering students. This paper also presents a research study conducted at my own work place K.G.R.C.E.T, Hyderabad, India., to capture the professional views of effective presentation skills and presenter attribute requirements for technical oral presentation. This study is based upon the final year engineering project presentation and third year class room presentation as its platform to elicit views of academic and business/professional community involved in evaluating the communicative event. The students found enthusiastic in learning interactively by class room presentations and result analysis of both the subjects have been made and it was observed that the student´s performance was good compared to last year.