| Before I start, I want to get one thing out of the way: You DO have interesting stuff to talk about. Everyone thinks that their work isn't interesting enough to warrant a talk or that they have to do serious heroics to create something talk worthy. That couldn't be further from the truth! Everyone wants to learn something, and everyone is interested in hearing other people's experiences. Now that's out of the way, this is what I do: - Write a blog post on something that interests you. Publish it here, Reddit and on your favorite sites (if you want to). This will help arrange the thoughts that will eventually become your talk. - Create a Slides presentation on your post. It doesn't have to be wordy, since you want people to pay attention to you instead of the projector. Here's an example of a good slide deck: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/randfish/inside-googles-nu... - Give a talk at your local Meetup (or user group for your tech; there are many of them). Email the organizer to ask if they're okay with it (they usually are unless they are really really big, in which case you might have to wait) That's it! It's easy to get into talks these days. One thing to keep in mind: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. You don't want to give a deeply technical talk to a non-tech audience and vice versa. Always keep your audience in mind. Writing your post before giving your talk will help with that. Also: your first talks will probably suck. You'll get nervous. You'll forget stuff. You'll probably improvise a lot. If public speaking is new to you, it will take some time to get comfortable with being in the spotlight. You WILL get better! It takes practice to get good at this, just like anything else. (I was on a national debate team in high school for three years, did a play a few years before that and did public speaking stuff in college; I'm comfortable with the stage, but it definitely took time to get there!) Good luck! |