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!

Recently, I attended a presentation by a smart, experienced professional whose goal was to provide an informative overview of his area of expertise to his colleagues. Unfortunately, he did not succeed in communicating his message effectively to the audience. How he prepared and delivered his PowerPoint slides interfered with his ability to share information with the audience.

What did he do wrong? First of all, the slides were crowded and hard to read. Also, instead of making eye contact with the audience, he spoke to the slides on the screen or buried his eyes in his notes, which he read from almost verbatim. Finally, he stood in front of the projector light so we could see his silhouette against the screen instead of the words on his slides.

This was not the first presentation he had ever delivered. His mistakes had been made permanent by years of practice, which shows that practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent – so you have to practice the right things in the right way in order to be effective.

Here are 7 tips for incorporating a PowerPoint presentation smoothly into your speech (and they also apply if you’re using Apple’s Keynote presentation):

1. Speak to the audience, not to the screen; turn your body so you face the audience.

2. If you need to look at your slides to help you stay on track, position your laptop as a “confidence monitor” so you can see the slides on your laptop screen while still facing the audience.

3. Stand to the side of the screen so you don’t block it. And use a remote control so you can advance your slides without having to be tied to the laptop.

4. Make sure your slides are legible from the back of the room. Avoid crowding your slides with too many words or images and make sure the font size is large enough. Also be sure that there is enough contrast so that the font color can be easily seen against the slide background. If you find yourself saying to the audience, “I know you can’t read this,” you’re in trouble. And have each slide focused on a message, rather than just a data dump of everything you know about the topic.

5. Be mindful about where your eyes are looking and be sure to make eye contact with all sections of the audience.

6. Don’t write out your entire presentation and read it word for word; you will bore the audience. If you try to memorize every word, you will be stuck in your head, worried about forgetting a word, instead of focused on the audience. And if you do forget a word, it will be difficult to find it amid the pages of your memorized script.

7. To use notes effectively, create a one-page outline of key phrases in large font so you can quickly glance at it and find your place. Tape or staple it to heavy cardstock paper so you can easily hold it with one hand or keep it on the lectern. The heavy paper will not flap around as you handle it and you will be less likely to fold and crumple it if you’re nervous. And if you place it on a lectern, it’s less likely to blow away.

The next time you have to incorporate a PowerPoint presentation into your speech, refer to these 7 tips. Effective slide creation and delivery can support your message and help you successfully communicate to the audience.

If you are working in a company, you may be asked for giving a professional presentation. You may have to give a presentation for your clients, coworkers, or even for your customers. If you find difficulty to speak in front of people, there are several ways that you can learn to create a successful presentation in your workplace. So, just check out the following tips and get the best result your presentation.

As the first step, you need to make an effective preparation for your presentation. You need to gather figures, various types of facts, and the other types of information. You have to do it quickly after you are being assigned as the presenter of presentation.

After you have gathered all the information that you need to prepare for your presentation, the next step that you need to do is to organize your data into a neat outline. It is because the organization can be the key of success for your presentation.

For the third step, after you have organized and gathered the information, you can use Power Point to display the material you are going to present. The interactive computer slide technology becomes a big hit among professionals the business sector today.

The fourth step is to write your script of the things that you want to present with each slide. It is important for you to practice your script over and over again. This can help you to come across in more professional tone with the audience.

The fifth step that you need to do in creating a successful presentation in the workplace is to think about some questions that may appear from your audience. Then, you can make some lists about the answers in which you memorize. It can help you to get your presentation runs more smoothly.

The sixth step is to catch the attention from the audience when you are speaking in the professional environment. It is known that there is thirty seconds rule for all professional public speaking engagements. It is believed that if you fail for capturing your audience’s attention within the first thirty seconds, you will be likely to lose their attention for the rest of your presentation. In this case, you have to develop rapport with the listening audience.

Lastly, if you want to make sure about the success of your presentation in the professional environment, you need to make your point as quickly as possible. You also have to make sure that you are periodically reviewing these information sessions throughout the professional presentation.