Technical presentation at NATO in Belgium:
How Improvisation Helped Me
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Delivering a presentation in French, whether it’s a pre-sales presentation or a technical training session, is not easy, especially when you are not speaking your native language.
As a French IT consultant, I had to deliver my first technical training session in English in front of highly technical engineers from NATO.
The Context: my First Technical Training in English
In 2016, I was working as a consultant for a BPM software company (BPM – Business Process Management) and I was chosen to give a technical training at NATO in Belgium.
They had recently purchased production licenses, so this technical training was very relevant for them to start complex projects.
As I already had experience delivering technical training sessions and I was used to travelling, it was obvious that I would be the one going to Belgium.
I always had logistical preparation to do before visiting the customer, but there was something new:
- I had to deliver the training in English.
- NATO is famous for its high level of security, so I expected the participants to have a very high technical level.
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Going to NATO: Something Unexpected Happened
I was in Brussels, I was fully focused and I needed a taxi to go to NATO.
At that time, taxi apps were not as popular as they are today, so I went to a taxi station and took the first taxi available.
The training session was supposed to start at 9:30 a.m. and NATO was not that far from Brussels, probably around 20 minutes by taxi….
But it took us more than 45 minutes to arrive, and the taxi driver dropped me far from the main entrance.
I later understood that the driver had intentionally taken the longest route.
I was running a little bit late and felt stressed.
Setting up a Technical Training with a Lot of Surprises
NATO is famous for its high security, so I had to follow strict security instructions:
- Leave my smartphone at the entrance
- No internet connection allowed on my professional laptop
- Never stay alone inside the building
I even tried a joke when I needed to go to the restroom, as one of the participants wanted to follow me:
“Can I go alone?”
We laughed after that, but I respected the customer’s security procedures and we continued discussing security-related topics later.
Before beginning, they helped me set up my environment with a laptop they had provided me for two days.
I also needed to install the practical exercises in virtual environments we were using for the hands-on exercises.
But it didn’t work as expected:
The exercises had been updated by my company without my knowledge, and they simply didn’t work.
Stress came back a second time after the taxi incident, and as I couldn’t reach my company, I had two solutions:
- Investigate why the exercises didn’t work
- Improvise and create new exercises in a few minutes
I asked the participants for a few minutes to design an exercise covering all the technical topics planned for the two-day training session. One of the participants answered:
“Sure. We’re flexible“.
It took a few minutes to create a new set of exercises with a topic flexible enough to cover all the subjects.
At that moment, I knew I saved the two day training.
Delivering a Technical Training in English: a Big Technical Challenge
As NATO participants came from different European countries (Belgium, Poland, The Netherlands…), English was the official language to deliver the training.
I stayed extremely focused when delivering the training in English.
It was not my first training with customers, I had already delivered some in French, so I was used to answering the same technical questions, expect for specific ones related to the customer’s future projects.
Whenever I received highly specific questions, I wrote them down, did my research and followed up with the customer by email later.
The more training sessions I delivered, the more I could answer technical questions immediatly, and questions I couldn’t answer immediately were more and more specific, because I had gained experience with my consulting missions at the customer site.
But I had a different situation at NATO, well known for its high level of security:
- One of the participants asked me many questions about the security of the BPM platform… a lot of questions.
At the time, however, I felt stressed, as I couldn’t answer most of his questions.
Of course, I wrote everything down and later sent him detailed answers.
No matter how well I knew my training material, in French or in English, I learned that sometimes the language is not the challenge:
I had to be well prepared to improvise with any customer.
What Expats Should Learn from This Experience
If you are an expat and you need to give a technical presentation in French, don’t forget:
- Participants are not there to judge your French level.
- They attend your presentation because they need technical answers for their projects.
So you have to master your presentation in French, while also being able to improvise when it comes to answering technical questions.
Final Advice for Technical Presentations in French
No matter what kind of presentation in French you have to deliver to your audience, you will always have to deal with questions.
Of course, the more presentations you deliver and the more you work closely with customers, the more you can answer questions easily.
But some customers can have extremely high expectations related to their business environment.
Of course you need to have a good level of professional French, but you also need to understand your customer’s expectations.
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