Business Writing & Presentation Skills

You would think that in this fast-paced, high-tech age that the need for effective business writing skills would diminish – in truth, you couldn’t be more wrong!

With communication flowing at such a rapid rate, the need for power-packed writing is at an all time high. It is estimated that any letter, memo, email or report only has 30 seconds at best to grab attention and be read and understood!

So, your writing needs to be concise, accurate and compelling, you need to get to the point as quickly as you can, support your reasoning before you lose your reader and get lost in File 13.

And if you recognise that better business writing skills are vital to your career then this training course is for you! But you are worried that this is going to be 2 days of boring lectures. Don’t worry – unlike the other 10 000 business writing courses available, we have gone out of our way to design a programme that is engaging, interactive but above all else practical!

Did you know that 90% of all Secretaries regularly make mistakes in their business documents! YIKES! Don’t let weak grammar and proofreading skills tarnish your credibility. You need to attend this 1-day short course for busy Secretaries and we can guarantee that you will write with more confidence from now on.

With 11 official languages, it is a proven fact that English only rates 5th on the list in terms of popularity in terms of being people’s home language. Research has shown that around 45% of the population of South Africa have a speaking knowledge of English…and even though it is the language of business, many people who speak English in business do not speak English as their first language (as the above number clearly shows) and this is where the problems often come into play.

But what is more worrying is that the statistics also show, that the average South African who can speak English fluently and write mistake-free business documents are the exception rather than the rule! And this is a huge concern because business depends on effective and efficient communication and the demand for you to communicate effectively in English is now more vital than ever!

So, this comprehensive 3-day training course will radically improve both your written and conversational English skills which will give you an advantage in your workplace. And this course goes one step beyond because simply learning how to write business documents is not enough…you will also learn how to clearly and concisely express your ideas with confidence and create a style of business conversations that works for you, no matter who you are communicating with.

Did you know that in a recent global online survey that most business people average only 3 productive days per week with a staggering 8.6 hours spent each week in meetings. So it is not surprising that 69% of the respondents feel that meetings aren’t productive at all!

Then you throw into the mix the fact that many business people seem to think that this topic of minute taking and meeting protocol falls squarely in the domain of a secretary…which seems crazy because in reality this couldn’t be further from the truth!

Firstly let’s tackle the issue of meetings – how do you react when a meeting request pops up in your inbox?

Most people think, “oh no, not another meeting.” But no matter who you are or what you do within your company you will be involved in meetings at one time or another. And let’s be honest how often are you stuck in long-winded, boring and unproductive meetings where people go off track, discuss issues that were not planned and go round in circles?

So the million Rand question is wouldn’t you, your team and your company be far more productive if you knew how to ensure that every meeting was 100% effective? Imagine if during every single meeting you were able to stay on task, on topic and on time…and eliminate meeting mayhem…what would that be worth to your bottom-line?

Of course it would be invaluable!

Now, to the issue of minute taking…again this seems to be a task often relegated only to secretaries but what happens if you don’t have secretarial support in your company? The simple truth is that effective minute taking goes hand-in-hand with effective meeting management. Because you can have the most wonderfully run meetings but if someone isn’t accurately recording the outcomes, you quite frankly are back to square one…because no one is going to recall everything said and every decision made.

That is why this training course is a must – because in just 2-days you will learn everything you need to know about how to run and participate in effective meetings that produce positive results!

At some point in your career you boss is going to ask you to take the minutes at a meeting. So, if you need to know about how to plan and execute the meeting without any mistakes as well as how to compile and format concise and coherent meeting minutes, then you need to attend this 1-day training course that covers it all and a whole lot more!

If you are in sales, consulting, training, public relations or any other high-profile job where dynamic and powerful presentations are key to your ongoing success then this 2-day training course is for you! Covering key pointers, tips and techniques that you can use to kick start any PowerPoint presentation from start to finish.

One of the most terrifying demands of the CPA and the one that will get you into hot water the quickest is the use of ‘plain language’. One of the driving forces behind this is that in the past companies have used ever trick in the book to get you to buy their product or service and how often have you seen an ambiguious message, one that you didn’t necessarily understand the first time you read it…but you bought the product or service anyway…and then after the purchase you had that dreaded feeling of buyer’s remorse or worse still you felt conned, swindled or cheated…well this is why the issue of plain language has become so very important.

The CPA defines that all communication must be written in a way that any ‘reasonable person’ can understand exactly what they are reading…so this means that all of your communication channels with potential consumers need to be revisited and reworked to make sure that they suit the requirements of the CPA.

This means that acronyms, slang, jargon, legalese need to be avoided at all costs and it is your job to make sure that the reader gets and understands your message the first time! This sounds like a pretty tall order for most companies who obviously may not have a plain language consultant stashed in the storeroom for a rainy day…but this is where this training course comes in..

So, if you aren’t a strong writer and break out into a cold sweat just thinking about how you are going to get this done then this training course is definitely for you!

The key objective of this training course is to give all Course Participants the confidence and practical know-how to write plain language documents for your business. So, this training course has been designed to be interactive and help you take all of the frustration out of plain language writing. It is NOT 2-days of boring lectures about the rules of grammar…but is focused on how you can sharpen and hone your plain language writing style to be in line with the requirements of the CPA.

In order to achieve this, you will have the opportunity to participate in plain language writing exercises during the 2 days which will then be evaluated and given back to you with comments from our expert Course Leader. In this way, each Course Participant gets personal and real-time feedback on his/her strengths and weaknesses and is able to monitor his/her own improvement.

The key objective of this training course is to give all Course Participants the confidence and practical know-how to write professional and polished business reports. So, this training course has been designed to be interactive and help you take all of the frustration out of writing any business report. It is NOT 2-days of boring lectures about the rules of grammar’but will instead concentrate on showing you step-by-step the process of structuring and writing well thought out business reports.