As a speaker at a conference...

November 28, 2017

Tags: #speaker #conference

Being a speaker at various conferences, I regularly attend talks of other speakers. Not always it’s fun to listen to them. During the last months, I noticed more conspicuously some (bad) habits of (bad) speakers. This led me to this short digest.

As a speaker at a conference, you not only should be an expert on the topic you’re speaking about (and hopefully have some knowledge besides it) and be kind to the attendees of your talk/session. You should (also):

  • be well prepared, in terms of knowing your setup and slides
  • be able to deal with failure (like “everthing” fails all time: laptops, presenters, beamers, microphones, light, live demos, etc.)
  • have a plan b, in case anything of the above won’t work, no matter what!
  • accept other point of views, they’re possibly legitimate, we speakers somewhat tend to have a very polarizing point of view in our topics / aka: don’t be dogmatic!
  • don’t bash against other technologies, approaches, languages, companies, see previous bullet
  • instead talk about the pros of your solution/product/etc. and why you are excited about (b/c it brings you lots of money is NOT a valid reason!)
  • don’ t tell others about your huge company, if it’s just a small one - it’s easy to find out, because we all have internet
  • don’t “sell” things, people will very quick get behind this and won’t trust you
  • …what else?… - write it to the comments!

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