Part 2: Decide Why You Want to Speak

← Part 1: Understand Technology Conferences

Part 2 of 8 in A Guide to Speaking at Technology Conferences.

Conference speaking takes time. A clear reason will help you choose opportunities, respond to setbacks, and decide when to say no. You may recognize yourself in several of the motivations below, and your reasons may change as you gain experience.

This article expands on the themes in CFP Land’s archived “Why Speak? 11 Reasons People Get on Stage”, adapting them for today’s software testing and quality communities.

1. Make speaking part of a professional advocacy role

Some technology professionals are employed specifically to teach and support a technical community. Their titles include developer advocate, developer relations engineer, community advocate, product educator, or technical evangelist. Speaking may be one part of the job alongside writing examples, helping users, gathering product feedback, producing documentation, and supporting open-source projects.

Testing and quality-tool companies have similar roles even when they use different titles. A person might demonstrate an automation framework, explain an observability technique, teach customers how to test an API, or bring practitioners’ recurring problems back to a product team.

Conference experience can help you explore this career path, but prolific travel is not the only model. Advocacy can also happen through online events, workshops, local communities, documentation, livestreams, and recorded lessons. If the role interests you, pay attention to whether you enjoy the preparation and follow-up work as much as being on stage.

2. Promote a business, service, or project

Consultants, trainers, authors, and small-business owners often speak to demonstrate how they think. A useful session can help future clients understand the problems you solve without requiring a sales pitch. Maintainers may also speak to help an open-source project reach people who could use or contribute to it.

Promotion works best when the audience receives value whether or not they ever hire you or adopt your tool. Teach the underlying problem, discuss alternatives, disclose your connection, and explain tradeoffs. A presentation built around exaggerated claims or a product demonstration disguised as education can damage trust and may violate the conference’s rules.

Treat commercial outcomes as possible rather than guaranteed. Speaking may lead to a conversation months later, or it may lead nowhere measurable. Decide in advance whether the event is still worthwhile without an immediate sale.

3. Help other practitioners

You do not need to be the world’s leading expert to help someone. You need a useful experience that you can explain honestly. A failed automation rewrite, an accessibility bug that changed your process, or a team experiment that improved feedback time may be exactly what another practitioner needs.

A familiar subject can still be valuable. New people continually enter the profession, and your explanation may connect with someone whom earlier explanations did not reach. Your particular industry, constraints, mistakes, or way of illustrating an idea can make an established lesson newly useful.

The strongest experience reports include boundaries. Explain the context, what you tried, what happened, and where the lesson may not apply. Helping an audience includes protecting them from overgeneralizing your success.

Speaking gives attendees an easy reason to begin a conversation with you. They already know one subject you care about and can ask about a detail from the session. This can make a large event more approachable for people who dislike unstructured networking.

Those conversations can lead to collaborators, mentors, podcast invitations, open-source contributions, future speaking opportunities, or friendships. Conferences can also connect you with practitioners from industries and countries whose constraints are very different from yours.

Leave time for those connections. When possible, attend other sessions, shared meals, or community activities instead of arriving immediately before your talk and leaving immediately afterward. At the same time, protect your energy: you are allowed to take breaks, decline a conversation, or choose a smaller social setting.

5. Build professional recognition

A clear, useful talk can make your work more visible. Attendees may remember your explanation, recommend a recording, follow your writing, or invite you to contribute elsewhere. Over time, a body of talks can demonstrate a recognizable area of expertise.

Recognition is not the same as celebrity. View counts and follower totals are incomplete measures of impact, and conference selection is not a ranking of personal importance. Chasing attention can also encourage exaggerated titles, unnecessary controversy, or speaking far beyond your evidence.

Aim to be known for helping people understand something, treating communities well, and representing your experience accurately. Recognition built on trust is slower but more useful than attention by itself.

6. Travel to new places

Conference speaking can make travel possible or more affordable. Some events pay for transportation and lodging; others offer a fixed stipend, an honorarium, a complimentary ticket, or no financial support at all. Never assume that acceptance includes expenses.

Before accepting, ask what is covered, when reimbursement occurs, whether you must pay upfront, and what happens if the event is cancelled. Include ground transportation, meals, visas, insurance, taxes, accessibility needs, and extra nights in your calculation. A “free trip” can still be expensive and requires preparation time away from work or family.

If you extend a trip for personal travel, clearly separate the costs the organizer approved from those you will pay. Travel can be a delightful benefit, but it should not pressure you into accepting financial risk you cannot carry.

7. Develop confidence and communication skills

Preparing and delivering talks gives you repeated practice explaining complex ideas to unfamiliar people. That practice can improve design reviews, stakeholder conversations, training, interviews, facilitation, and leadership—not only future conference appearances.

Confidence usually grows through manageable repetitions rather than one dramatic leap. An internal lunch-and-learn, community meetup, panel, or lightning talk may be a better starting point than a large international stage. Record a rehearsal, ask for focused feedback, and choose one skill to improve at a time.

Speaking does not affect everyone the same way. Anxiety may diminish with experience, remain present, or require accommodations and professional support. Success does not require becoming an extrovert or enjoying every moment in front of a crowd.

8. Create career opportunities or find a job

A conference talk can provide concrete evidence that you understand a subject and can communicate it. Recruiters or hiring managers may encounter your session, and people you meet may later tell you about a role. Talks can also lead to teaching, writing, workshops, community leadership, or other work you had not considered.

Do not turn the session into a public résumé. Concentrate on the audience’s problem and let your biography, profile, or conversations provide career context. If you are job seeking, make it easy to find accurate contact information and state the kinds of opportunities you are open to.

Remember that public visibility has risks. Decide how much personal information to publish, separate professional contact channels when helpful, and ask organizers how recordings and attendee data are handled.

9. Enjoy the energy of performing

For some people, completing a talk brings a powerful burst of energy and satisfaction. The combination of preparation, nervous anticipation, focused delivery, and audience response can make speaking genuinely fun. That feeling alone can be a valid reason to return to the stage.

Other speakers feel exhausted afterward and need quiet time. Many experience both reactions at different events. Plan around your own nervous system rather than imitating a speaker who thrives on a packed schedule.

Enjoying the stage should not displace the audience’s needs. The presentation is still an exchange of their time and attention for something useful. The best performance energy supports the lesson instead of becoming the lesson.

10. Advocate for a cause or an overlooked perspective

Technology decisions affect accessibility, privacy, safety, labor, sustainability, fairness, and people’s ability to participate in society. A conference session can show practitioners how ordinary design, development, and testing choices contribute to those outcomes.

Conference programs also improve when they include people from different roles, regions, industries, career stages, and lived experiences. You may be able to describe constraints or communities that are rarely represented on stage.

Approach advocacy with care. Center affected people rather than using them as an abstract example, protect private information, cite their work, and do not claim to represent a whole community. Be precise about what you know and what action you are asking the audience to take.

11. Learn through teaching

Preparing to teach exposes gaps in your understanding. Questions from reviewers, peers, and attendees force you to define terms, test assumptions, build demonstrations, and support claims. Turning experience into a coherent explanation can make you better at the work even when the proposal is not accepted.

Some speakers deliberately choose a subject they want to explore more deeply. That can work when the proposal honestly reflects their level of experience and they leave enough time for research and review. A conference deadline can provide useful motivation, but it should not become a reason to present speculation as expertise.

Teaching is especially powerful when you build an example, compare approaches, or explain why a technique failed. The process makes hidden assumptions visible and often produces reusable notes, code, diagrams, or exercises.

Choose a reason that can sustain the work

Your primary motivation affects which events make sense. Someone seeking community may favor a small participatory conference. A professional advocate may prioritize the right technical audience. A person developing confidence may choose a local lightning talk. Someone hoping to travel must look closely at expense policies.

Decide how much time and money you can spend, how far you can travel, and how public you want to be. Consider accessibility, caregiving, visas, health, and employer approval early. If your employer benefits, discuss whether preparation counts as work and whether the company will cover costs.

Write down a modest first goal, such as giving one ten-minute talk, submitting to three well-matched events, or developing one session you can improve over a year. A clear reason and a realistic goal make it easier to continue—and easier to decline opportunities that do not fit.

← Part 1: Understand Technology Conferences · Part 3: Understand How Conferences Choose Talks →