I generally agree with your thesis that the case here is desperate. However, > a PhD takes a lot of work and how much of it is actually doing presentation spec

I generally agree with your thesis that the case here is desperate. However, > a PhD takes a lot of work and how much of it is actually doing presentation specifically? Yes, I know they do presentations as part of it. But the kind of presentation skill you want is what your typical smooth talker is good at Step zero of "smooth talk" style rhetoric is to start with the audience and work backwards to the speech. Doing/understanding something complex and difficult, and then digesting it down to something that a diverse (if specialized) audience can understand, is quite different from what "typical smooth talkers" do. In fact, it's literally reversed. Your message -- the unvarnished complicated truth -- is fixed. Giving an eloquent speech to a friendly general audience on an easy topic is a good skill, particularly in sales/fundraising/etc. But it's quite different from the communication skills one learns during a phd. There are many jobs in which the phd-style communication skills are more important than sales-style communication skills. Generally positions where there's a team of folks working on a "hard" and rigid truth that doesn't care about you. E.g., leading/helping/consulting with a team of technologists to understand and solve a hard problem with a physical device or piece of software. "Uhms" and "ahs" don't matter, eye contact is optional, but cleanly communicating about complex ideas with other experts is necessary.