Giving Tech Talks — What is it Good For?
I love talking. According to my parents, that’s most of what I did as a kid. If you’ll ask my wife, she’ll tell you that it is still the case.
As a manager, I’ve learned that in some cases I need to talk less, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
As a person that enjoys speaking, it was natural for me to want to speak in public, and I’ve been speaking about things I’m interested in every chance I got. I learned over the years that there are many benefits for giving tech talks (or public speaking in general) to your peers at your workplace, in local meetups or in international conferences.
Even if talking in front of people doesn’t come naturally to you, here are five reasons that I think make it worth stepping out of your comfort zone:
- Deep Dive — Learn a topic very well
- Communicate — Learn how to deliver a message
- Calibrate — Get feedback/validation from peers
- Grow — Work on your personal brand
- Impact — Inspire others
Deep Dive
When delivering a talk on a topic, you want your talk to have value to your audience. In most cases, it means deep diving into a specific domain. The research you need to do in many cases is broader than the actual talk itself because people might have questions that venture slightly outside the scope of the talk. Being able to deep dive into a topic and explain it is a core skill for any professional to have.
Communicate
Knowing the topic very well and having good explanations and examples is not enough. Your talk needs to be interesting. We live in the era of social media. Your talk needs to tell a story, with visual aids and with a clear “what’s in it for me” message. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be amazing as long as your content is interesting by itself, but you can't read out loud black and white slides full of texts in a monotonous voice and expect people to stay awake. Knowing how to keep people engaged when speaking is an underrated skill that most people can greatly benefit from in their day-to-day work.
Calibrate
Giving a talk and getting feedback from people is a great way of achieving some calibration on your skills. You might impress people with your knowledge and how you are able to apply it, or face the fact that what you thought was a novel approach is common knowledge. Feedbacks and questions you get will help you get a feel of your industry and what areas you might want to explore more to better position yourself.
Grow
Public speaking is not something we usually do. It pushes us from our comfort zone and drives us to grow and learn new things, as I discussed before. Another important aspect of this type of growth is that it is visible. When people see you (live or on social media) giving a talk, you are strengthening your brand and showcasing your skills. Public speaking is not the only way of doing so, you can write technical posts, contribute to open source etc. but it probably has the most visibility.
Impact
My reasons so far for public speaking were for the speaker’s benefit, and that is obviously fine. People should strive to improve themselves and bring up their stock price. What’s nice about public speaking is that (hopefully) while doing something for you, you’re also impacting others. Inspiring others with new ideas, offering solutions to problems they have, teaching them new things or even making them laugh (or at least smile). Helping others can be very satisfying.
Summary
Whether speaking in front of an audience comes naturally to you or not, it can benefit you in many ways. At least some if not most of the benefits can be achieved even when speaking to a small group of people you know, so you can always start small.
If I was able to convince you that giving tech talks is good for you, but you don’t have any idea what to talk about, wait for my next post that will address exactly that :)
