Make Me Over!

My colleagues and I attended a seminar last week. The seminar featured some high level people, some experienced people in the industry. Everything went well – the topics were good, the profile of the speakers were impressive, until a couple of the speakers showed their presentations.

Now, we acknowledged that it’s difficult to persuade media educators because we tend to be very critical – I mean, we have to, right? Considering that we have been teaching students subjects like “persuasive communication”, naturally we have high expectations.

So anyway, these speakers spoke with powerpoint presentations, and to our horror, the powerpoint were very badly done! Everything that we told our students not to do – such as don’t put too many words on one slide, don’t use yellow background with red text, etc – they did it. We were very tempted to ask for the softcopy to show as bad example for PerCom.

The point is, packaging is very important. The content was great, it’s just that it wasn’t presented in a way where the audience could understand, or could be receptive. Japanese are so successfully in selling their culture because they packaged everything so well! More so if you are in the media industry – it’s a big packaging business…

Then I read The Sunday Times on how this person landed more interviews when he attached a makeover photograph of himself together with his resume. The point was that employers look at the “face value”, literally before they decided to give you a chance to even impress them with your knowledge.

Well, yes, we often say that inner beauty is important. Nowadays, inner beauty must be packaged nicely too.

No wonder I had a hard time landing a job when I first graduated – during my time, there was no such thing as “complete makeover”.