Why Technical Professionals Struggle to Present - And How Training HelpsYour Tech Team
- Apr 22
- 3 min read
Let's be honest. Some of the brightest people in your organisation are also the worst presenters.
I don't mean that unkindly. I've seen it too many times to ignore. You have engineers and data analysts with Masters degrees in statistics, computer science, AI, etc. who can solve problems most of us can't even properly describe. Genuinely impressive people.
But put them in front of a client or their own management team, and something goes wrong.
Their slides come up but there are way too many of them. The text is tiny. The charts are complex. And your team member is facing the screen, reading the slides out loud, while the room quietly switches off.
Here's What's Actually Happening
Technical people are trained to be thorough. To show their work. To prove that the numbers are right.
The problem is, business audiences don't need all of that. They need the short version. They need to know what it means for them, and what they should do about it.
But nobody told your tech team that. They walked out of university knowing how to build a model. Nobody sat them down and said, "Now here's how you explain it to someone who has never heard of a p-value".
So they present the way they were trained to think, which is from the ground up. Every variable. Every assumption. Every step.
And by the time they get to the point, they've lost the room.
The Bit That Really Gets Me
Here's what I find most frustrating about this, and I say this with a lot of warmth, because I've worked with these teams.
They genuinely believe that if they lay out all the data clearly, the conclusion is obvious.
It's not.
A CEO or a client sitting in that room isn't thinking about your methodology. They're thinking about budgets, risks, and decisions they need to make by Friday.
When your analyst presents seventeen slides of statistical output, the business person across the table isn't impressed - they're confused. And confused people don't say yes to anything.
What works is when someone can look at the numbers and say something like this:
What this means for your business is this.
Here's a real example of how it plays out.
Here's what I'd recommend.
That's it. That's the whole thing. But it takes practice to get there, and it doesn't happen by accident.
What This Is Actually Costing You
When technical staff can't communicate clearly to a non-technical audience, things fall apart.
Decisions take longer because nobody's sure what they just heard.
Good work gets shelved because it wasn't explained well enough to get buy-in.
Your team loses credibility - not because the work was bad, but because it didn't land.
And over time, people start working around them instead of with them. That's a real cost. It just doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.
What Presentation Skills Training Actually Does
A proper presentation skills training programme - one that's built around the real challenges your team faces - doesn't just teach people to stand up straight and make eye contact, etc.
It teaches them:
How to organise their message for the person in the room, not the person who built the model.
How to decide what goes on a slide and what comes out of their mouth.
How to read the room.
How to use a simple story to make data mean something.
How to present a recommendation, not just a report.
These things can be learned. I've seen it happen, and it changes how a team operates..
Want to Talk About Your Team?
If any of this sounds familiar, I'd genuinely love to hear about it from you.
I design and run customised presentation skills training for professional teams here in Brunei and across the region, including technical teams who need to communicate with business stakeholders without losing them halfway through slide three.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation to see if it makes sense for your organisation.
Head over to my Presentation Skills Training page for more details, or drop me a message to set up a no-obligation call. Happy to chat.
Doris Suresh is a corporate trainer based in Brunei, with over 25 years of experience working with teams across Asia Pacific.
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