Jan Miklos, Country Director, AstraZeneca Slovakia

AstraZeneca Slovakia, having operated as an independent market became part of the Central European cluster of 5 countries along with Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. It was quite a change for our people to work in such a different environment where we faced new challenges including more exposure to leaders above market and communication and presentations in English. We realised that if we want be successful we have to do something to be accepted as people who know the business and who are professional in what we are doing.

The Fast Forward Presentation skills workshop was really valuable for the people. During the session they realised what is important and what is not important in preparing a high quality and interesting presentation. The most important thing was to understand that not the quantity of slides but quality is king as well as how to keep awareness and interest during the presentation. As a guide they learned to reduce the number of slides they had always worked with before to just 1 slide per 5 minutes, which gave an overall picture about the length of presentation regarding slides. This enabled more focus on the audience and the core message of the presentation.

We planned the presentation skills workshop to take place before the 1st face-to-face meeting with our new area director and this meeting was very important for the whole team and our business. We therefore had a chance to transform the skills gained from presentation training into real life. The meeting was excellent and everyone did a really great job – not too many slides, but important and relevant messages in the presentations and it created good business discussions. I was very satisfied that the first impression about Slovakia and my team was very positive, and this was honestly thanks to the great training beforehand.

I can see that my people are now much more confident and have no problem in being a partner in discussion with leaders above market. Internally people are more confident to have presentations in front of people from other countries and I know this will be good for them in their development and career path not only in Slovakia but within the company internationally.