How can you link your conference talk to your career goals?

- 🧭 Clearly define what you want to achieve with your talk and its main message. - 👥 Understand your target audience and how you want them to feel, think, or act after your talk. - 🎯 Align your talk's content, structure, and delivery with your career goals, such as raising your profile or generating leads. - 💡 Highlight your skills and expertise to demonstrate your value to potential employers or collaborators. - 🔄 Use the talk as a platform to network and build relationships that can advance your career objectives.

Maybe it may sound totally counterintuitive, but the less you care about your goals, needs and ego and the more you care about giving true value to your audience - or your clients or anyone for that matter - the more likely it is that you will reach your goals.

Yes, the statement is pretty true. Having a clear idea of your main message and target audience is crucial for preparing an effective talk. Your purpose should shape your content, structure, and delivery, aligning with your career goals, such as raising your profile, demonstrating skills, generating leads, or finding collaborators. This focus ensures your talk is impactful and achieves the desired outcomes.

Your purpose is key in delivering valuable insights at a conference. Knowing your purpose helps to construct a tailored content for the values that your audience deserves to have. You teach principle and not necessary your experience to others. That makes them understand clearer.

In preparing for a talk, it's vital to know your main message, understand your target audience, and align the presentation with your career goals. Your objective should guide the content, structure, and delivery, aiming to provide value and evoke a desired response from the audience. Streamlining key messages to the relevant points, being present during the delivery, and engaging with the audience are crucial for a successful and impactful presentation. Through thorough preparation and being in the moment, you can effectively convey your message and achieve your goals.

The mix of attendees at every conference is different. This means the same talk or workshop will land differently with each audience. Go to the keynote, see which points are landing with the attendees. Do the same for a couple of other talks if you are able to. Tweak your msg, and even add photos from the keynote to your slides to repeat the points that you and the audience connected with. The best research you can do is observe audience behaviour.

Put yourself in their shoes - understand what’s important to them, what are they worried about, what would success look like? Use this to structure the stories you share. Talk about scenarios and examples you have encountered and share the emotions you felt. This can help make your speech much more memorable and actionable for the audience.

I find it more productive and helpful to link my conference talks to my audience. Who are they? What would resonate with them? What value are they here to receive? Connecting with my audience on a level that fuels reflection, relativity to my talk and prompted to take action is the goal and intention.

If possible, look up their professional profile on LinkedIn, or other social media platforms to know their experiences and leanings. Then, when one asks a question, you could respond by saying something like: "I think I understand where you're coming from, since you've been a software developer for 12 years. . . ." Perhaps that will put the person in the right frame of mind to continue listening.

Your role as a speaker is to know your audience's challenges and then offer solutions from the stage. Solutions are best shared through relatable, real-world, simple stories, packed with energy and positive expectation. Give them three takeaways that will change their life.

Maya Angelou said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Storytelling is essential for establishing connection & trust. As an educator, I hesitated to share my personal journey, yet my experiences as an introverted student & perfectionist shaped the educator I am. Gaining the courage to write "Tech with Heart" was my way of igniting meaningful conversations about whole-child wellness & leveraging technology to create inclusive classrooms that empower every voice. This led to an invitation to give a TED Educator talk. The process of developing my talk into a compelling narrative further enhanced my ability to connect with & impact others.

Speaking at conferences is a powerful way to showcase your expertise and establish authority! 🎤🌟 But remember, it’s not about overwhelming with jargon or data. Instead, craft a captivating story that resonates emotionally, illustrates your key points, and highlights your unique insights. 📚✨ This approach not only engages your audience but also sets you apart from the rest. 🚀💡 What storytelling techniques do you use to connect with your audience? Share your tips below! ⬇️👥

Great speakers make complicated information sound simple. Bad ones make simple information sound complicated. I always say that for every audience there is a line. Where the line is depends upon your audience, their experience, background, knowledge, culture etc. But, every audience has a line that represents the simplest you can go. Your objective is to stand on the line. This represents the most connection you can achieve. If you go under it, you lose them; you might even get accused of teaching them to "suck eggs". But, for every degree you go above it, you lose connection. It's a tightrope! Knowing where that line is involves research, expertise, skill, empathy and experience. However, when you get it right, your talks will fly.

A word of caution: Be careful not to sound vain, because, most times we don't seem to know when we cross that line from sincerity and confidence to vanity and ambitious pride.

It can be better to showcase your expertise and experience in writing a compelling introduction to be used before your begin. This way, you're not making yourself the hero of your presentation yet the audience knows, even before you begin, that you are an authority on the subject.

Doing this early on in your speech can also help settle your nerves. Engage with the audience from the start with a simple question and show of hands, to help create a feeling of dialogue and interaction with your audience. It can help make you feel like you’re all in this together!

Your audience may have specific expectations of what you are going to say. However, take the risk to share the unexpected! For doing that, you would need to research beforehand who your audience are and look for new views or ways of thinking you could offer them. Unexpected things can trigger curiosity amidst your audience and stimulate them to better connect with you as speaker. The communication should nevertheless have a two-way character. Show your curiosity towards the audience as well. In this way, your talk can help bring new relationships to your career and enhance existing ones.

Embrace conference speaking as a catalyst for connection. More than relaying information, it's an opportunity to build rapport and trust. Engage your audience through a conversational tone peppered with humor or relatable anecdotes. Employ body language, eye contact, and tonal variation to exude enthusiasm and sincerity. But remember, dialogue is a two-way street. Invite your audience into the conversation by encouraging questions and feedback. Respond in a manner that demonstrates you value their input. This not only solidifies a memorable impression but also nurtures meaningful relationships that can support your career aspirations.

From the moment you hit the stage, you must build rapport. You must focus all your attention on this audience connection until you see and feel people relax, engage and become willing to go on the journey you have planned for them. You'll need to test lots of different openings to find the best fit for you and your audience. Then rehearse, rehearse, rehearse....

If you are one of many speakers at a conference, a good tool to get engagement is to ask your audience to stand up & move, to talk to one another, or otherwise shake up the back to back nature of the event. Another option is to be quiet in your presence. Many people try to follow the TEDx formula of impact statement & pause. Instead, depending on the topic it can be very powerful to hold a room in a quiet moment of reflection or emotion. If you are talking about something that raises emotion, lean into it. Your audience will want to come with you, and will be disappointed if you try to fight letting emotion out. If you are talking about something technical, focus on your joy or interest in the topic - let your enthusiasm be contagious.

Post about your talk and others' on LinkedIn! People who have seen you speak will look for you here. Providing more insights and opportunities for connection and follow-up questions will be appreciated by attendees, event hosts and sponsors, and your wider network. You can also share your thoughts on other presentations, and work to lift up a wider network of speakers.

Organise themed and branded gifts for the organisers and schedule a post-presentation de-brief call as soon as possible after the end of the event. This is when you request testimonials, referrals and offer further speaking or training solutions. Remember, your focus should be on helping them, not on you and your goals.

Use an app like talkadot.com to offer your slides in exchange for audience members’ email addresses. Look up the audience members on LinkedIn to see if their backgrounds could help advance your career goals. Email those audience members, thanking them for attending your presentation and asking if they’d be open to a short call. You already gave them your slides, so they may be more likely to give you a few moments of their time.

Offering a bonus is a good practice to stay in touch and provide value after the event. Bonuses help our audience to learn more from us and get to know our work more. With continued communication with regular emails, we will keep providing even more value, and they will trust us more. However, everything we do should be of quality and value.

Taking a photo 📸 can be an easy way to keep communication going after your talk… just post and tag! The tags will generate activity, since it’ll push the post to other connected member’s feeds. A discussion point or question in your post (along with thanking your audience and hosts) can really build comments! As always, make sure you have consent before posting someone’s photo. And remember to write a picture-description for visually impaired users.

If you’re speaking in front of an audience, it’s possible there’s someone listening that could support you. I don’t suggest making it all about you (the event planner probably wouldn’t love that) but there’s likely a place where you could include a comment about what you’re working towards. You could simply say, “I’ve had a goal to accomplish X and I am stuck. I haven’t found the right person or the right opportunity”. Tie that in with your content and it’s likely someone from the audience will approach you afterwards to support you in working towards that goal.

I believe that speaking at conferences is both an honor and a privilege. It allows you to connect, inform, and influence audiences on key industry and society issues that cannot be solved individually. The personal benefit is that such opportunities can increase your personal brand, recognition, and trust. If you are working hard to help the audience with problems they face, in a constructive and professional manner, they will respect you for it. Every time I step on the stage, my driving thought is how can my words and actions benefit those who have so graciously offered their attention. Especially in the cybersecurity industry, communication and collaboration are a necessity for success.

After speaking for more than 15 years, one of the undervalued things I've realized is this... Never count the people in the room. Don't worry about the quantity, focus on the quality, and measure impact over your career. On quantity: I've presented to a room of hundreds & 0 people engaged or followed up. On quality: I've presented 2 hours to 1 guy in a giant empty room. At the end he got up and left. A week later he invited me to present to his team, today they are a customer. On measuring impact: I gave a speech 6 years ago, connected with the attendees on LinkedIn & nothing. A dude got a new job & called me recently, "I saw that presentation, I'm now the boss, please come meet with me." You just never know who is in the room.

Never underestimate your audience, for today's students are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. They will remember you as someone who equips them with the necessary tools to thrive and achieve their goals. Therefore, always strive to do your best, regardless of the audience. Your commitment to excellence will leave a lasting impact on their journey towards success.

No one exists on this planet that knows and can explain everything. You can't be an authority on every topic. Knowing how to refer people to those who are more informed on a particular subject matter than you is a mark of a genius.