After Dinner Speaker Skills

The skillset of any experienced and successful after dinner speaker will be varied. These skills are especially clear when an after dinner speaker is compared with an amateur or beginner. This is because inexperienced speakers may not have finely tuned all the skills which are so vital to great presentations.

Of course, given the massive variety of different messages an after dinner speaker might be asked to get across throughout their career, communication skills are a must. However, humour is a vital string to the speaker’s bow if he or she is to keep the audience from becoming bored. Because the after dinner speaker is expected to entertain the audience during what is a natural lull in proceedings, they must be humorous to prevent any after dinner lull. As well as humour, brevity is a very important skill. Conveying messages without spending hours doing it always makes for a good speaker.

In-depth knowledge is also vital to the after dinner speaker. It is also very important that the after dinner speaker can demonstrate good, solid knowledge of the topic about which they are speaking. The audience is unlikely to take a speaker, or their message, seriously if they appear to be lacking fundamental knowledge of the topic. In this regard, the person responsible for hiring the after dinner speaker has a role to play. Hiring a former Big Brother housemate to speak at a conference on sales techniques would obviously be foolish. Still, even a knowledgeable speaker will need to be given some information about the company and the audience.

Understanding an audience and what it is that they will require is a nother major part of the skills of an after dinner speaker. Of course, this does not mean that audiences should neglect to provide background information. Failure to understand the needs of an audience has caused many an after dinner speaker to make gaffes in the past, with inappropriate jokes at the top of the list.