Adapting corporate presentation skills training practices for use in a university classroom.

INTRODUCTION

Some of today's most popular corporate training seminars and workshops cover subjects taken right from speech communication textbooks: leadership, facilitation of small groups, team building, negotiation, communication skills, presentation skills, and persuasion, among others. Since such courses focus on training rather than education, the subject matter is handled differently than in academia. Structural and funding differences also exist between corporate training and university teaching. Resources are more abundant in the corporate world, but time is a luxury. The one-day training course is the norm. Even with these differences, however, there is much that training facilitators and university instructors can learn from each other.

Purpose

Trainers, most of whom have at minimum an undergraduate degree, are able to use the ideas and experiences gained in college classrooms in the development of training programs. University instructors, however, do not have the reciprocal privilege since they have less access to corporate training programs. Knowledge of "what goes on" in business training should be useful information for instructors, particularly for those teaching performance-based courses or units such as public speaking. Both trainers and instructors share the common objective of improving the public speaking skills of participants/students.

With this in mind, I examined a presentation-skills workshop taught in a corporate setting to determine what aspects of that program might be transplanted to a traditional university public speaking course. Ideas gained from the workshop were applied to the public speaking classes I taught at a western university. This article is an examination and discussion of this process.

The corporate training program discussed in this paper is a week-long presentation-skills workshop presented to employees of a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. I chose this particular program because its length more closely approximated the typical university experience than did shorter presentation skills workshops. This particular workshop has been in existence since 1984 and is considered by management to be successful in improving employee public speaking skills. Participants also rate the workshop highly. I first observed and then participated in this workshop. During the two workshop weeks, I conversed freely with both facilitators and participants. Since the participants came from a variety of cities and often did not know each other, my presence in the workshop was not viewed as unusual. I subsequently talked to developers of this program and also viewed historic documents, including a file of past evaluations.

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