# Presentation on Communication Skills: What to Include and How to Structure It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/presentation-on-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/presentation-on-communication-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Assigned a presentation on communication skills? What to include, how to structure it in three sections, and the questions your audience will actually ask. ## Key facts - Title: Presentation on Communication Skills: What to Include and How to Structure It - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Influence - Primary keyword: presentation on communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/presentation-on-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Assigned a presentation on communication skills? What to include, how to structure it in three sections, and the questions your audience will actually ask. - Practical guidance for presentation on communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation You have been assigned a presentation on communication skills, and searching turns up the same thing every time: slide packs, template decks, and lists of a hundred possible topics. None of them tell you what to actually say. A presentation on communication skills works best when it covers four things: what communication at work actually consists of, why it decides outcomes, where it breaks down, and what the audience can do differently. Build it around three main sections, keep every example workplace-specific, and let your delivery demonstrate the point you are making. Why those template decks feel thin is worth understanding before you build yours. ## What should I include in a presentation on communication skills? Include four blocks, in this order: the components (what communication at work is made of), the stakes (what changes when it is done well or badly), the failure points (where it breaks down), and the practice (what someone can do differently tomorrow). Most decks online cover only the first block, and thinly — a slide splitting communication into "verbal" and "non-verbal", then a slide of tips. That split is accurate and useless at once: it tells an audience nothing they did not know and gives them nothing to do. Each of the four blocks does a different job. The components give the audience vocabulary. The stakes give them a reason to care. The failure points give them recognition — the moment someone thinks "that happens in our team meetings." The practice gives them something to leave with. ## What are communication skills, exactly? At work, communication is not one ability. It is a set of distinct habits that show up in different situations, and someone can be strong in one and weak in another. Saying that early beats any definition, because it turns a vague quality into something specific enough to work on. The practical breakdown runs like this: principles that apply everywhere — being clear and direct, being brief, stating the main point first, adapting to how the other person takes information in, and genuinely wanting to understand them; the judgment call of choosing a conversation over writing, or the reverse; conversation habits such as giving full attention and managing how long you talk; written habits, mostly email; useful participation in meetings; and the difficult moments — disagreeing, giving feedback, apologizing, handling someone who is angry. Every item there is a behavior someone can picture themselves doing. "Verbal and non-verbal" is not. ## How do I structure a presentation on communication skills? Use three main sections. The University of Illinois Graduate College and presentation guides such as Businessballs both point to the rule of three for exactly this: three sections are enough to build an argument and few enough for an audience to hold onto. Three to four key messages inside a clear introduction and conclusion is the standard shape. Map your four content blocks onto it. Open by naming what the audience will get, run components, stakes and failure points as your three sections, and use the practice block as the conclusion. The closing then becomes the part they actually use rather than a summary slide. Two details matter more than they sound. Decide your three key messages before you open the slide software, because building slides first produces a deck with no argument. And find out who is in the room beforehand — standard preparation advice is to establish the audience's background and existing knowledge before choosing examples, since a class of first-year students and a room of working colleagues need different illustrations of the same point. ## What's the difference between communication skills and presentation skills? This comes up constantly in student discussion threads, which is a good sign it deserves a slide — your audience will be wondering it while you talk. Presenting is a subset of communicating — the one-way, prepared, one-to-many end of it. You have the floor, you planned what to say, and dialogue is limited to questions at the end. Communication as a whole covers the two-way situations: the conversation, the disagreement, the email thread, the meeting where you have to read the room and adjust as you go. The useful consequence is that presentation skill does not transfer automatically. Someone can [deliver a polished talk](/knowledge/communication/presentation-skills/) and still handle a difficult one-to-one badly, because the second requires reading and responding in real time and the first never tests that. ## Why are communication skills important enough to present on? Because they are among the few workplace skills that are never specific to one job. They transfer across industries, roles and organizations, and they do not become obsolete the way technical knowledge does. That is a stronger argument than the usual claim that communication matters because everyone says it does. For a student audience there is a sharper version. These skills persist as problems precisely because they are rarely taught anywhere — schools skip them, employers assume you arrived with them, and formal training, where it exists, tends to come late and through programs most people never enter. So the default way to learn them is [trial and error at work](/knowledge/communication/develop-communication-skills/), in front of colleagues, with real consequences. Most rooms have not heard it put that way. ## What are the barriers to communication? The standard list — noise, emotion, poor listening, assumed knowledge — is fine, but it works better as recognition than as a taxonomy. Turn each barrier into a situation the audience has been in. Poor listening is the one worth developing, because it is the barrier people underestimate in themselves most consistently. When people describe their own communication problems in online discussions, the causes repeat: being shy, lacking confidence, [listening badly](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-be-a-good-listener/), and fearing they will be misunderstood. Three of those four are about the speaker's internal state rather than their technique. That is a genuinely interesting point to make, and it sets up your practice section — most communication advice targets output, while a lot of the real difficulty sits upstream of it. ## What topic should I choose if the choice is mine? Pick the narrowest topic you can support with real examples. "Communication skills" as a whole is too broad for a fifteen-minute slot, and the topic lists that dominate search results run to a hundred or more options precisely because no single one of them is a complete answer. Workable narrow topics include why listening is harder than it looks, how to disagree with someone senior to you, choosing between a message and a conversation, and [what makes an email get read](/knowledge/communication/email-writing/). Each is small enough to cover properly and concrete enough to fill with examples. The real filter is whether you have material. A topic you have observed or struggled with beats one you have only read about, which is a good reason to work out [where your own skills sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit — your weak spots are usually the most specific material you have, and they are the ones you can do something about. ## How do I keep my nerves under control while presenting on this? Presenting on communication carries a pressure the topic creates by itself: the audience is judging how you communicate while you explain communication. That raises the stakes above an ordinary assignment, and it is a reasonable thing to feel. The fix is not calming down but preparing further. Know the material well enough to answer questions that go past your slides — command of the subject is what removes the fear of being caught out, which is why thorough research does more for nerves than any relaxation trick. Rehearse out loud rather than in your head, because the two are not the same skill. And expect some nervousness to be present. The goal is delivering well while nervous, not clearing the nerves first. If something goes wrong mid-talk, name it plainly and move on. An audience forgives that immediately. What they notice is a presenter trying to cover it up. ## The skills that make this presentation easier to build Read back through those answers and a pattern shows up: very little of the difficulty is about slides. Choosing a topic, building an argument, reading the room, handling the questions, staying steady while people watch — those are a handful of abilities applied to different parts of one task. They also happen to be the abilities the presentation is nominally about, which is worth noticing about yourself before you stand up. **Communication** is the obvious one, though not in the way the topic suggests. You are not only describing the principles; you are being measured against them for the length of the talk. Stating your main point first, being brief, adapting to how this particular audience takes information in — a room feels those whether or not you name them. The gap between explaining a principle and demonstrating it is where presentations on this subject lose credibility. **Building Confidence** carries the delivery, and it comes from doing rather than from deciding to feel better. Break the talk into parts and rehearse each before running the whole. When a section goes badly, move to the next one instead of replaying it while you are still on stage. Confidence here is a by-product of practice, not a precondition for it. **Influence** separates a presentation people sit through from one that changes something. It runs in three parts: preparing, by working out what this audience actually gets from the talk; pitching, by establishing rapport early and using examples and stories rather than walls of bullets; and persisting, by following through on whatever you asked them to do. That last part is what actually changes behavior afterward. The **free Work Skills Test** checks where you stand on these three and on the nine other work skills the framework treats as learnable rather than fixed. Since you are about to explain this subject to a room of other people, it is a fair moment to find out [which ones to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — a gap you can name is one you can practice. Some of this may already describe how you work. If you tend to think about who is in the room before deciding what to say, or you notice when a conversation has stopped being useful, that is the same skill the presentation is about — just running quietly, without a name attached to it. None of it is fixed. These are learnable behaviors rather than parts of a personality, which means a gap is something you have not practiced yet rather than something you are. You can build any of them and still be recognizably yourself at work. They also compound. The rooms get more senior and the conversations get harder to walk away from — the skills behind a class presentation are the same ones behind a project pitch five years on, which makes now a cheap time to find the gaps. You have already done the part most people skip: you went looking for what should actually be in this presentation instead of downloading someone else's deck. The remaining question is a narrower one — which of these skills is yours to work on. ## Find out where your own skills stand You have the structure and the content; the only thing left is to find out which parts of it you already do well. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It scores you across all twelve, communication included, and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to you specifically rather than in general. For a presentation on this subject it doubles as raw material — the topic is far easier to talk about credibly once you have looked honestly at your own habits. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *It takes 7 minutes, and your results are ready the moment you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Assigned a presentation on communication skills? What to include, how to structure it in three sections, and the questions your audience will actually ask. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Confidence, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/presentation-on-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Assigned a presentation on communication skills? What to include, how to structure it in three sections, and the questions your audience will actually ask." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.