The Aim of Battling “Presentation Poverty”
To attain the objective of becoming a middle-income country by 2021, we necessitate outshining contemporaries in the field of business and thus require a superbly skilled workforce that can communicate, present, sell, and lead. However, the inability to give impactful presentations has turned out to be a grave problem among today's Bangladeshi youth in the form of what can be called the "presentation poverty".
Aimed at feeding the crying need and with the vision to create 20,000 world-class presenters by the year 2020, the Presentation Success Movement (PSM) was launched in 2015 to enthuse, train, and assess Bangladeshi students on presentation skills. In continuation to its activities, the country's first Presentation Success Movement was held on January 21, 2017, at the Krishibid Institution Bangladesh. The summit was a day-long event encompassing inspirational and informative workshops on presentations conducted by Bangladesh's leading experts in the field. The attendees received life changing advices, mentoring, coaching, tips and tricks on how to do well in presentation and heal the presentation phobia and also witnessed the best presenters of Bangladesh fight for championship in the grand finale of PWK Nationals 2016.
PWK Nationals is the flagship annual competition that emphasises on developing presentation skills of the participants with its exclusive format. The competition inaugurated in 2012 and comprises of four rounds, beginning with the online registration and slide submission round. For PWK Nationals 2016, a boot camp session was held in November 2016 with the top 24 teams at NewsCred in order to upskill the participants. Out of about 100 participating teams, the top 24 competed against each other in the quarterfinals held in NewsCred. It was a test of presentation skills in front of a panel of judges from 9 renowned local and multinational corporations. After a spectacular show of talent and neck-to-neck competition, 12 teams managed to squeeze their way through to the semis, held in December 2016 at the EMK Center in Dhanmondi.
The semi-finals, due to its intriguing and challenging format, are aptly named the "Persuasion Round". In the groundbreaking round, pairs of teams were pitted against each other on a common topic. Both teams would be able to witness the presentation session of the other – observing and noting their points and arguments. After being given some time to regroup and strategise, both teams would present again, with team A's sole purpose being to refute team B's former arguments and vice-versa. Six teams moved forward to the Grand Finale where they competed in the form that's toughest of all: "Instant Presentation". As mentioned earlier, the Grand Finale was held as part of the Presentation Success Summit on January 21, 2017.
Out of about a hundred registered teams, team Last Second from the Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP) clinched the champion's title of PWK Nationals 2016 whereas team Ikigai from North South University and team Brains of Castamere from Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka won the first runner up and second runner up titles, respectively.
The event was powered by The Daily Star with strategic partnership from GEEKY Social and PRAN-RFL Group.
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