Is Toastmaster Club Worth It? A Review from a UX Designer’s Perspective.
I joined my local Toastmasters club, hoping I could one day speak at a conference. Was that successful?
If you are looking for an introduction to what people do in a Toastmaster club, I have a separate article about this.
The online community seems to form a cult on this topic. People seem to be overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Toastmaster clubs; many even went so far as to claim that it is a game changer for their careers.
It’s been four months since my first club meeting. After four speeches and near-perfect weekly meeting attendance, I would like to share my subjective feelings about this non-profit club activity.
Pros
Toastmaster brings a lot of values to someone new to public speaking — and that is probably why it gained so much popularity online.
People are friendly.
Toastmaster clubs offer an extremely friendly environment. All participants are encouraging each other in their persuasion, and the online training materials do not go too harsh on you either. This is a safe environment for you to practice and fail, without having to worry about harsh judgment and career consequences.
You make local friends.
Many choose to participate in a Toastmasters club near their neighborhood. I was invited to a berry-picking, a potluck and evening walks, and am told that there may be an ice cream social coming up!
If you are an introvert like me but are looking to make some extra friends around your neighborhood, Toastmasters can be a good place for these activities.
It was cheap.
According to Toastmasters International’s new member application form, the fees are divided into three parts: a new member fee (to unlock online pathway courses), a recurring membership due (depending on which month you join), and a club due (depending on what your local club charges). The first two are charged by the global parent organization Toastmasters International, while the last one goes directly to your local club’s fund.
I paid $60 for my first 5 months' worth of participation. Given that my club meets every week, this is roughly equal to $3 per meeting.
There are no obligations.
If you cannot show up for meetings, there’s no punishment, although it is always nice to let people know about it ahead of time. Some people prefer to show up every other time, while others may challenge themselves by joining multiple clubs at once to collect feedback from different angles.
One exception though is they do expect you to step up at some point to be an officer of the club (or district, or higher). My local club’s officer roles include President, VP of education, Treasury, VP of membership, etc.
Everyone gets the chance to speak up.
I have always been an outcast during business lunches. No matter how hard I try, there has always been someone by the table who knows more and takes over the whole conversation.
However, in Toastmasters, people take turns speaking and use a timer to make sure nobody is overpowering anyone else. This way, even the shiest ones can be forced out of their comfort zone and speak up for themselves.
Projects are progressively designed.
The projects, supplemented by Toastmasters International’s online learning materials, are well-paced for new toastmasters. Each project pushes its learner a little further in their selected pathway without being overly intimidating. People who are more advanced in public speaking also have the freedom to skip to a more challenging project.
Cons
Things that are newcomer-friendly tend to be not as effective for advanced users, and thing advanced users favor does not always please new users either. Toastmasters is no exception.
Hardly anybody comes from your industry.
I cannot be the only person who tries to explain what a UI/UX designer is to people from outside the software industry, let alone help them distinguish the difference between “UI” and “UX”.
Toastmasters’ participant demography is not much different from a random sample on your neighborhood's street. If you try explaining something work-related, a general audience is not going to understand the content without you spending a long time introducing the context. They will still give you suggestions on your speech delivery, such as your body language and whether you are making enough pauses for audiences to digest, but you will not get recommendations on how to tell a good story / how to make a better slide — which, for me, is more important.
One possible exception to this is if you join a club sponsored by your own company. They will still be publicly listed, but you are more likely to get a lot of your colleagues as your audience. You may be able to take advantage of that and talk about work, and perhaps even discuss internal topics that only your company’s employees should have access to. But hey… you lost all that safe, no judging protection. This is not much different from a day-to-day presentation you give to clients; might as well ask your co-workers directly for feedback, instead of through a Toastmasters club.
If practicing professional presentation is your goal, maybe you can seek to organize a local event on meetup.com instead. I would also recommend joining design conferences (e.g., UXDX) or release conferences (e.g., WWDC, Google I/O) to learn about how to tell a good story.
Their presentation skills are not great either.
Be prepared that the majority of the members are not masters in public speaking, or else why would they join the club in the first place?
If you graduated from a design school, chances are that you are already forced to give demos to your classes, explaining your design decisions and the work behind them. You may spend hours and hours perfecting your PowerPoint, carefully selecting the best words and images to illustrate your point. These are details that professionals would notice but are rarely captured during a Toastmaster speech.
To really polish a job talk, such as a portfolio presentation, the best thing to do is to find a mentor, spending hours with them going through your slides until everyone is satisfied. Do not expect people who (1) are untrained in your industry and (2) rarely (rarer than average designers) have to give presentations to a larger audience to give you any good presentation feedback in just a few minutes.
You may run into a few volunteers who like to stick with the club after they “graduated” from their pathways and gained more presentation mastery. They are rare, and it is rarer for them to actually show up for your talk and be designated as your speech evaluator. I would not count on my own luck.
They are too polite.
How can anyone be too friendly? They are all solid nice people as friends, but when you are looking for substantial improvements, they offer more carrots than sticks. After all, the club's mission is to “provide a supportive and positive learning experience”. This is good for new speakers to step up, but it is not effective for advanced users.
There have been a few times when I noticed something wrong with my own presentations, either I was under-prepared (didn’t test Zoom), or I made some blatant grammar mistakes (being a non-native speaker). Prepared to receive criticisms, I was surprised to find that my evaluator did not point out any issues with my speech.
Toastmasters International tends to favor theatricals.
If you watched Toastmasters International’s speech contests, they are by no means similar to TED Talks. Their speech contests focus more on the theatricals and try to make the speech as animated as possible, while a TED Talk (or any other speech in the real life, honestly) is more about conveying information effectively.
There are generally three places where a designer’s speaking skills are tested: when you give presentations to stakeholders, when you are mentoring others, and when you are networking. What you learned from Toastmasters may help a little bit during an in-person networking event, but is not valuable for much else.
For me?
I reached out to Toastmasters originally because I wanted to give talks during conferences, and a colleague recommended the program to me. I was dubious at the beginning but quickly convinced myself that it does me no harm (my company paid for the club fees as part of a development plan).
But so far I have not run into anything that I couldn’t detect with a video recording of myself. And inter-personal networking within the Toastmasters club barely happened because all meetings are virtual — it is hard to ask for a group dinner or linger around after meetings for small talks.
Who suits the best for Toastmasters?
Since this is a UI/UX blog, I am going to give advice primarily from the designers’ perspective, but other trades may find this information helpful too.
For designers, I would say generally no, Toastmaster clubs are not worth your time. If you are a junior designer trying to get a new job, I think you would be more effective if you practice alone or find a mentor.
Remote Learners
For designers who went through a remote training program online and have limited experience in public speaking, I think it may be beneficial to get yourself acquainted with presenting to a large, unknown audience.
But note that a Toastmaster club speech is different from what you typically do in your job, so you may want to add some customization to it. In addition to requesting a longer time for speeches, I would encourage you to reserve plenty of time for a “QnA” section at the end of your speech, as that is roughly what designers’ job interviews feel like.
Another thing worth practicing is to do a “group discussion” Toastmaster project where you try to control the flow of a discussion. UI/UX designers frequently join discussions with peers and stakeholders while brainstorming for ideas, and people tend to get lost if nobody is steering the conversation. Being able to engage in detailed conversations while helping maintain a big picture for the group is crucial for a design good discussion.
Toastmasters is great for people who sweat over public speaking. But if you already present to peers and clients semi-regularly, I think Toastmasters is not effective for your career advancement.
