HOME
HOME
CONTACT US
CONTACT US

Virtual Training References 2020
Click here to view

Courses

In line with the new Hybrid workplace, all communication Guru programmes can be trained live or virtually. Communication Guru training programmes are further customised to address each training brief and the unique developmental needs raised. Quotes will be supplied once a comprehensive needs analysis has been obtained.

Below are some of our most popular courses. Hundreds of other customised programmes have been created and delivered over the last 23 years.

Our most popular courses:

Most presentation skills training programmes are limited in that they are don’t give learners the necessary stress management, vocal control and strategic thinking skills that enable speakers to think on their feet, build confidence and wow audiences. This unique programme builds speakers holistically, giving them all the skills, tools and confidence they need to shine and succeed. The programme is the culmination of twenty years of corporate presentation strategy and delivery techniques that have been mastered and refined by communication guru, John French. Learners are developed holistically and strategically, resulting in a massive boost in self-confidence, presentation delivery and sales success. We offer three levels of presentation skills courses: Beginner, Advanced and Presentation Skills for Investment Professionals.

Presenting has changed drastically over the last few years. The Covid Pandemic turned us all into virtual presenters who now also need broadcasting skills for the rest of our careers. Learning how to master virtual presentations and cameras is very different to the old live presentation skills that professionals used to learn.

Our Hybrid Presentation Skills Programme is designed to teach you all you need to know about how to present confidently and professionally, whether it be live or virtually.

Ask yourself:

  1. Do you know how to set up your virtual recording ‘studio’, whether at work, at home or when travelling on business?
  2. Do you know how to sort out your lighting to have more presence, allow your virtual backgrounds to work and still be illuminated during load shedding?
  3. Do you know how to make engaging eye contact with the camera, build virtual relationships and influence your virtual audiences?

In the new Age of Hybrid communication, you need to learn both live and virtual presentation skills. This is what this innovative and practical presentation skills programme is all about.

The modules covered on this 2-day programme will boost your self-confidence, help you to manage your nerves and ensure that you present with impact to influence your stakeholders and achieve your business objectives.

Each delegate is given an opportunity to present and get feedback from both the facilitator and the other course delegates. This will help you to integrate and apply your new skills and also establish what each delegate needs to focus on for further development.

In our present COVID-19 world, virtual meetings and presentations have suddenly become the norm. Even if you are an experienced presenter, you will now need to learn the new virtual presentation skills. Virtual presentations are far more challenging. They require special new expert skills.

It is far more difficult to hold an audience’s attention virtually, due to the lack of real time connection as well as the numerous distractions at home. By training many group and individual virtual training sessions throughout the crisis, we have been able to identify the various virtual trends and virtual communication shortfalls. We have put this knowledge together into our Virtual Presentation Skills programmes to fast track the virtual skills of your employees and to help safeguard your carefully curated brands which are presently at risk.

We also give delegates the opportunity test drive their new virtual presentation skills. Each delegate will get the opportunity to present or pitch a segment from a regular virtual business presentation and afterwards three tier feedback will be given (by the delegate, fellow delegates and the facilitator).

This practical, engaging and informative coaching gives delegates practical and powerful game changing techniques they can use immediately to improve their presentations and pitches in a virtual environment.

Depending on the level at which your team needs to present and master virtual presentations, Communication Guru offers you three types of virtual presentation skills interventions:

  1. Introduction to Virtual Presentation Skills – 3 hour Zoom workshop
  2. Virtual Presentation Skills Programme – 4 X 3 hour Zoom sessions, broken up over time / 2 days
  3. Virtual Presentation Skills Master Class with practical virtual presenting application and feedback – 6 X 3 hour sessions, broken up over time

Clients may also book some individual sessions for individual virtual presentation skills refinement, polishing and coaching.

The aim and strategy of our unique leadership transformation programmes is to grow and transform your leaders. Our Leadership Transformation Programmes have been 26 years in the making. Our differentiator is that we specialise in training both hard and soft leadership skills. Your leadership pipeline will be empowered through our customised leadership modules which create sustainable and meaningful leadership transformation.

Communication Guru provides year on year leadership training on the following leadership programmes >>

  • Standard Bank of South Africa APEX Senior Leadership Programme
  • Standard Bank of South Africa APEX Middle Leadership Programme
  • OMIG Leadership Development Programme
  • Telkom Leadership Programme
  • MacDonalds Leadership Programme
  • AMPLATS Leadership Programme
  • Old Mutual MMDP Leadership Programmes
  • South African Bureau of Standards Women in Leadership Programme
  • Sanlam Advanced Leadership Certificate Programme
  • Reserve Bank Senior Management Programme
  • M&G Investments Leadership Programmes
  • Ninety One Leadership Programmes
  • Sygnia Asset Management Leadership Programmes
  • Intembeko Fund Managers

Leadership Transformation Programme objectives >>

Communication Guru strategically grows and supports your leaders to confidently and effectively lead their teams by developing:

  • The skills and competencies to create more productive workplace environment with excellent team engagement, staff motivation and a strong work culture.
  • We help create a stronger and more empowered leadership pipeline.
  • Insight into the critical importance of leadership skills and competencies in conjunction with their professional hard skills.
  • Heighten personal awareness and self-mastery around their personal patterns of engagement and the impact this has on others and the professional environment.
  • Insight into personal leadership signature presence and how to increase personal impact to expand positive personal presence and impact.
  • To increase leadership communication skills to enhance engagement, productivity, and the growth of employees as well as the business.
  • A deeper and stronger relationship bond of leaders in the business who understand each other and are aligned with business goals.
  • The programme is designed to address leadership shortfall areas identified by the business and to shift current blocks and derailers.

What is even worse than performance anxiety? … VIRTUAL PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Have you noticed recently just how many people won’t turn their virtual cameras on?

  • Are they worried about data costs? (Maybe)
  • Are they embarrassed about showing their colleagues their homes? (Most probably)
  • Do they lack the confidence to look into the camera and be filmed? (Yes!)

The Coronavirus and the lockdown dynamics have forced your staff to communicate, engage and present via the various virtual platforms. But, even the old presentation skills courses can’t save them now. Virtual engagement and virtual presenting require a whole new skill set to hold attention online, build relationships online and to influence your clients online.

The pain points are obvious:

  1. How do I communicate confidently in front of a camera?
  2. How to I control myself, my nerves and my audience?
  3. How do I get my stagecraft right (background, lighting, camera angles, sound and video)?
  4. How do I handle IT and connectivity issues?
  5. How to I reach out and connect with a digital audience who is so far away? Is it still possible to pitch to and influence them?

In this new virtual workshop, we will teach you and your colleagues the essential skills you need to engage professionally and perform confidently on your various virtual platforms.

This virtual workshop consists of theory and guiding principles. The rest of the virtual workshop is geared towards answering your pain points, questions and online challenges.

This winning combination of executive coaching and communication skills coaching fast-tracks professionals in middle to senior management positions. The coaching shows the delegate how to become a more strategic, impactful and influential communicator and professional. It gives them the necessary confidence and communication skills to achieve their full potential. Confidence, presence and impact, and communication success are the outcomes. The programme is completely customised to an individual’s needs and a communication audit takes place in the first session.
This is a call centre/customer service training programme that covers all the communication essentials that most other programmes do not. The psychology of excellent customer service, expert knowledge on how to use your voice effectively over the phone, crafting and perfecting the delivery of your telephonic greeting as well as numerous other modules make this the most holistic and effective client service programme on the market. The programme helps to build trust and inspires confidence through the use of excellent vocal communication skills, superior customer service and heightened Emotional Intelligence. Clients who have implemented this programme witness significant improvements in staff morale and targets being achieved.
The Digital Revolution has changed the way we all communicate. Digital communication is often very different to what you learned at school and many people feel insecure about not knowing how to communicate appropriately or successfully online. This practical training programme helps you to communicate correctly, easily and with success with all your online communication. It will help you to gain online popularity, build and protect your online brand and community, and shine out there in cyberspace. Digital communication skills are fast becoming the most important communication skills of the 21st century. Don’t be left behind.
Your voice is often your primary means of communication. Nothing tells your clients and audiences more about you than your voice and your vocal power. It reveals fascinating details about your background, education, status, attitude and levels of self-confidence. There is also no such thing as a bad voice. There are simply many poor vocal habits that can be corrected with the help of a skilled voice coach. This life-changing and breakthrough vocal development programme helps delegates to maximise their vocal potential so that they can communicate confidently, clearly and more convincingly.
Exceptional influencers are able to effectively network and collaborate with others to gain support and co-operation in order to drive strategy, accomplish goals and accelerate results. While some might be inherently better at influencing than others, the good news is that influence skills can be learned. Pitching & Influencing explores the power of influence in complex Matrix organisations. It provides a simple and practical approach to influence, ample practice time, and an opportunity to work on real influence challenges facing delegates. The various training modules will help delegates to create more presence and make a stronger impact on their colleagues, teams and stakeholders. Meetings, negotiations, presentations and sensitive conversations will all become easier to handle and their business objectives will become easier to achieve.
“Your brand is not a choice. It’s a projection.” – John French, Communication Guru In the age of Social Media and The Global Village, everyone suddenly has the potential to create revenue streams and careers from their personal/professional brands. Building a brand is like constructing a building. Each piece of you needs to be fully explored, and you need to be aware of how to use and leverage each part of your incredible potential. This programme will help you to identify the markers of your unique brand, and will upskill you to create more presence and impact with your stakeholders and various audiences around you. You will learn how to lead, succeed, engage and influence. You will learn how to manage your weaknesses and leverage your unique strengths. The programme will result in you truly and effectively “stepping into your power”.

We can create and customise training programmes for any communication topic. Below are some other programmes we have trained regularly over the last 23 years:

As English is the language of business and therefore communication in our corporate world, the ability to write and speak the language effectively is essential. The main aim of this programme is to give delegates the skills and confidence to write their business documents in English.

The programme is specifically designed to master the basics and rules of good writing, and to put them into practice. It will explore the complexities of e-mail and business writing, and samples of your writing will be assessed to pin-point personal writing faults.

Effective report writing is essential to many careers and roles, yet reports and high-level writing is something that many professionals battle with. Often those required to produce reports are self-taught and spend many hours wasting valuable time, not having the requisite know-how and as a result produce less than adequate reports.

This in-depth report and advanced writing skills workshop is designed to teach corporate writers the principles of great report writing. Aspects of strategic and effective reports and high-level writing are addressed. The workshop and exercises are designed around real report-writing scenarios that relate to learners’ needs.

Prerequisites:

  1. Grammar and punctuation need to have already been mastered. This is not an entry-level writing skills programme.
  2. Delegates must have had at least some experience of writing reports.
  3. Delegates ideally should have access to a laptop computer to bring and share their “sanitised” reports to enhance the learning process.

Pre-course work

  1. Business Writing Skills assessment. This assessment is completed by delegates before the training to establish competency levels and to customise the programme.

You need to first be able to make a great first impression and sell your credibility before prospective clients may be ready to buy into your products or services. This requires confidence, excellent communication skills and 21st century Emotional Intelligence to build relationships and to sell in a more strategic and effective way.

Our customised sales programmes teach salespeople how to communicate more strategically and effectively so that they can build client relationships, close more deals and reach their targets. Self-confidence, selling with your voice, stress management, client service, target focus, and your deal-closing skills are all greatly enhanced.

Our approach to sales training goes deeper and wider than most other programmes available. We will teach you how to sell and influence at a subconscious level where results and agreements are assured.

Salespeople who have completed our programmes have a competitive edge in the market. Invest in your sales skills. Anyone can improve their sales ability. It’s the most important skill in any business.

Negotiation is the most challenging and complex form of business communication. To be a winning negotiator, phenomenal communication skills are essential. The expert negotiator needs to understand the complex psychology of the negotiating game and how to use heightened Emotional Intelligence to achieve their desired outcomes.

This master class teaches learners the fundamental negotiation communication techniques and builds the necessary self-confidence to achieve desired outcomes. Relevant role-plays from delegates’ work situations are used throughout the programme to ensure integration back in the particular negotiation situations.

Our approach to negotiation goes deeper and wider than most other programmes available. We will teach you how to negotiate and influence at a subconscious level where results and agreements are assured.

Your career and your company’s future may depend on your ability to handle the media. Like all other communication skills, media skills can be learnt. Our highly specialised media training ensures that learners have a thorough understanding of what this complex medium involves.

Delegates will be given the tools and skills needed to sell themselves effectively under the spotlight. Training is totally experiential so that learners get a chance to “feel” what they need to reproduce in front of the media. Recording equipment will be used to give unbiased feedback and simulated role-plays will give learners the necessary experience in different media situations.

The financial world is widely known for giving weak presentations … information overload, death by PowerPoint and boring monotonous speakers are just some of the complaints. Financial presentations need to be strategic, captivating and convincing in order to attract wealth and to close deals. This can only be achieved with great communication and presentation skills.

Our unique training service offers presentation skills assistance to professionals in the financial and investment world. It assists with marketing and presentation strategy, PowerPoint design and structure, winning presentation delivery, and how to close deals and attract business.

This customised programme analyses your team and its individual members. Our team analysis helps with role and function allocation, team members getting to understand one other, and with team cohesion. The team learns how each team member’s unique strengths should be leveraged to achieve team targets.

Strategic input is also given to establish team vision, values, and individual needs and expectations. The team also learns how to communicate and manage one another far more effectively. A team who has undergone such a programme is programmed for success!

John French helps many individuals, teams and organisations with the development of their vision, marketing and communication strategies. John has the experience and knowledge to strategically analyse both individuals and organisations, and see their potential. He then helps to develop a strategic plan to achieve and communicate the desired objectives. One such project in 2012 helped a client to close R5.5 billion deal.

Do you have a particular communication development need or challenge? John French has 23 years of experience in communication strategy and developing customised training solutions.

Talk to the best. We’ll take care of the rest. …

Request more information and a quote form
TRAINING INFORMATION (OPTIONAL)