Webinars

It is amazing how many webinars are held each week and being in IT there are a lot of different ones that we get notified about.

Yes webinars are a great way to communicate with a large number of people at once but there starts to be a time that there just seems to be too many webinars. We have one organization that has basically one webinar a month and that is great. These are the ones that we both try and attend because it provides us with the information that we need. This organization also understands that you can’t always attend due to work and they record the webinar and the link is quickly sent out to everyone that registered to attend.

Some organizations think that having a webinar every week or two is good but that gets to be a little much. Also webinars need to be short so that people can get back to work quickly because it does impact the work day when they are scheduled in the middle of the day. Another thing about webinars is that they need to start on time and keep to the amount of time that was scheduled. If you schedule an hour webinar make sure that you respect the attendees time and keep the webinar to within that time.

Webinars can be great to communicate the different pieces of information but they can also be overwhelming sometimes. If questions are taken during the webinar it can interfere with the material that is being covered and result in the presenter going off topic. Questions are great to be answered at the end of the presentation because if for some reason the presentation is going over time due to the number of questions as an attendee you can decide if you are going to stay connected or not. We have been in webinars that the questions are being answered during the presentation and the entire presentation ends up just being a Q & A instead of the presentation that was scheduled. If a webinar is going to be a Q & A that is how it should be described when it is announced.

When you register for a webinar you will need to ensure that you have a location where you can do the webinar and also if this location is out in public ensure you have headphones that you can use. Just making sure you are ready for the presentation will also make the experience a little better.

Webinars are a great tool for the communication of the various skills but if they are not used wisely it can impact the experience of both the attendee and presenter. As a presenter make sure you are totally prepared and have tested everything before you start and answer the questions at the end of the presentation so you don’t get sidetracked. As an attendee make sure you have the time to attend without all the other distractions that can occur but know that in a lot of cases if you are interrupted you can watch the recorded version of the presentation if they do one.

Well it is now time for me to prepare for a webinar so I need to ensure I had my headphones ready so that I can listen to the presentation without all the distractions that are currently around me.