So you’re a recent college graduate seeking your first full time job. As such, are you willing to accept any salary that a company offers you? You’re probably excited just to be offered a job and don’t want to rock the boat, right? I bet you’re thinking to yourself that you’re in no position to negotiate a salary. Well, you’re wrong.

Most people are too afraid to negotiate their salaries and while you may feel that it won’t affect you right now (you’re just happy to have a job offer, especially in the current state of the economy), not negotiating your salary can impact your salaries in future years. Having worked alongside hundreds of graduate job seekers the most common response I get as to why a new graduate did not negotiate their salary is because they were afraid the employer might take their job offer away. I can tell you that this cannot be further from the truth. The hiring process is a long and time consuming process (also a costly process – think about how many hours go into the selection process), and a company is not going to take back their job offer because you want to negotiate your job salary. In fact, employers actually expect to negotiate salaries and as such often offer lower salaries than what they can pay for the role.

My advice is simple. Don’t wait until you have been in the job for 1 to 2 years before you ask for a pay rise. Negotiate your job offer. You have nothing to lose!

Researching is the key to negotiating:

We all want to be paid as much money as possible. This goes without saying. However, the key to negotiating is to present a valid case as to why you deserve a higher salary. Before you begin your negotiation you need to know your market value. What is the market rate for your type of position? Using online salary tools is a great way to find out what other graduates in similar roles and similar geographic areas are getting paid. This is important as comparing your salary as someone who may live in a large city to a person living in a remote area will be different. In addition to using salary tools, use your own networks, speak with people within the industry, contact your career services office at your university and search forums and blogs.

When the time comes to begin the negotiations, be confident and be prepared to justify your worth. Back up your negotiation with examples. Most importantly, just be yourself. Remember that the interview process is not just about the hiring manager finding out if you’re a good fit for their organization, but it is also about finding out if the company is a good fit for you.

Negotiating can be an uncomfortable and frightening experience, but once it’s over and you have secured a higher salary you will be smiling all the way to the bank!

At a workshop recently I heard someone giving a talk which was really interesting and I took away some valuable points from it. So it got me thinking about what makes a good presentation. Now, I’ve designed a lot of PowerPoint presentations in my time but I’ve delivered very few of them. Like a lot of people, the thought of standing up in front of a group makes me nervous. However, others can stand up for an hour and speak off the cuff about their subject, and make it interesting and memorable. How do they do it? OK, there are a few people who are natural public speakers, but for most of us, it takes a lot of preparation to stand up and speak clearly and concisely about our subject.

So from my experience of both creating and listening to presentations, I’ve put together some tips of what I think can make or break a presentation.

Do

• Rehearse your speech and ideally get someone to listen to you or record yourself.
• Use humour and a personal story to open the presentation but be appropriate.
• Know the message you are trying to get across and stick to the key points.
• Keep the colour scheme simple and ensure the text is readable against the background.
• Have the same slide design throughout the whole presentation.
• Put your company branding and logo on the presentation to make it look professional and help build a relationship with your brand and the audience.
• Keep animations and transitions to a minimum so they don’t confuse and distract the audience.
• Use creative ways of presenting your information eg, pictures, charts, and animations which will grab people’s attention.

Don’t

• Speak without any preparation or notes unless you’ve done it successfully before.
• Start the presentation without checking that everyone can hear you.
• Don’t wander off the subject, and if you do, ensure the audience knows why and quickly come back to it.
• Use technical language, acronyms or jargon unless it is relevant for your audience.
• Read from a script – it can sound stilted and prevents you from making eye contact with the audience.
• Put everything you want to say on the PowerPoint slide and then just read it out.
• Overload the slide with too much graphics or animation. They should be used to make the message clearer not confuse the audience.
• Use different formatting and colour schemes on each slide.

Perhaps you have other tips to add to the list? However, it’s important to remember that a clearly delivered and well-designed presentation will promote you and your business professionally and effectively to your audience.