We are currently preparing for our annual internal conference, Tech Jam! Each year, we have a multi-day event with a mixture of internal and external speakers to share, demo and generally help us to grow as a tech org. This is always one of our best times of year and an event that everyone looks forward to attending. Over the years, there’s been a great mixture of presenters across tech teams, across various levels of experience and also with varying levels of technical depth vs. personal development topics.
We love hearing from our peers and have recently opened up our internal CFP (call for proposals) for them to propose their talks for the event. We also acknowledge that sometimes people have never given a tech talk at a conference before and there might be some nerves or hesitation to do so. But because we care about our team here, we have been offering a great opportunity to everyone in tech to help with this.
In an effort to widen our internal speaker pool and to make sure that each and every person with an idea gets a chance to be heard, our Women in Tech group has been offering a skill development group, called ‘I Want to Give a Tech Talk!“. The group put together an amazing series with different sessions and topics covered each week as we lead up to our Tech Jam event. It’s hard to believe, but we’re already halfway through the series and we want to celebrate everything that’s been offered to-date!
- Session 1 (April 5): An introduction to the series and cultivation of content for future sessions
- Session 2 (April 12): “Creating Meaningful Content”
- Session 3 (April 19): “Defining the Objective(s) of your talk: What will the audeicne take away and WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)”
- Session 4 (April 26): “What’s it like to present at Tech Jam? The audience, platform & tools”
- Session 5 (May 3): “Building an Outline for your Talk”
- Session 6 (May 10): “Types of Presentations & How to Choose What’s Right for Your Topic”
- Session 7 (May 17): “Crafting Your Presentation & Storytelling”
This has been a great chance for many of us to engage with others along the journey of creating valuable content, whether a novice conference speaker or a seasoned veteran. We want to give a huge shout-out to the Women in Tech team for putting this event series together and can’t wait to all benefit from the great talks that our internal team members will be sharing in July at our Tech Jam event!
