Thanks for writing this. This is one of the deepest dives into public speaking I've seen :)
Before reading, I was in the "do public speaking and great things will follow" camp, but I didn't have a good plan to connect those two dots. It was eye-opening to see how much effort can go into that.
Will it help you acquire new skills? Absolutely.
Will it help you meet new people? Most definitely.
But will it help you market yourself to an absent buyer that hides behind a complex job interview process? Nope.
A tough but fair take.
I'm a little more optimistic that public speaking will get you in front of a decision maker, I suppose that varies by industry. But I'm also happy to consider public speaking as a hobby activity.
Oh, another thing that I forgot to mention is that even if you're in front of a decision maker or economic buyer, there's a good chance you're talking about stuff that they don't care about or can't evaluate, anyway. A director of software development, 10 years removed from the keyboard, will have no way to evaluate whether your "The Pitfalls and Joys of Closures" talk should give you the inside track for a position, assuming he or she attends such a talk.
Personally, I think the idea of "I'd do this for personal development" is the key. For instance, I blogged for a lot of years (and still do today) because I enjoy writing, first and foremost. So any career implications were a bonus.
But if I didn't enjoy writing all that much, then starting a blog because "I think it'll help my carer somehow" isn't a path I would have recommended to a younger me. I'd say, instead, "before you start writing, figure out exactly what you want out of this content creation effort and work backward."
As for having buyers in the audience, I think this probably varies both by industry and by what you're intending to sell. For instance, if you're intending to sell courses or tools to software developers, you're in front of precisely the right audience.
If you're looking to sell labor... it's complicated. In many organizations the economic buyer, the "decision-maker" and the gatekeepers are three different people: VP/CTO, dev manager, and architect/tech lead/senior engineer, respectively. You're certainly in front of the gatekeepers (who are kind of competitors), you might occasionally be in front of the decision-maker, and you're rarely, if ever, in front of the economic buyer.
But even if you were, the economic buyer creates a system (i.e. interview/hiring process) to take care of spending his or her money. So the economic buyer would say, "wow, I like the cut of this speaker's jib, but I'd be a bad boss if I stepped on my people's normal process, so I'm not going to do that for a random person that impressed me vaguely for a little while." And the decision-maker would say, "I like that speaker, but I'd get in trouble with my boss if I bypassed the interview system and gave this person the inside track." And if either one tried, HR might have something to say about it.
It's not that these things never happen, of course. It's just that buying app dev labor is a such a well-established group buying process that it's "sticky," in the sense that it strongly resists impulse buys/opportunistic hires. And that, in turn, makes "impress them from afar at a conference" a sales/marketing channel where you're swimming very much upstream.
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Thanks for writing this. This is one of the deepest dives into public speaking I've seen :)
Before reading, I was in the "do public speaking and great things will follow" camp, but I didn't have a good plan to connect those two dots. It was eye-opening to see how much effort can go into that.
A tough but fair take.
I'm a little more optimistic that public speaking will get you in front of a decision maker, I suppose that varies by industry. But I'm also happy to consider public speaking as a hobby activity.
Oh, another thing that I forgot to mention is that even if you're in front of a decision maker or economic buyer, there's a good chance you're talking about stuff that they don't care about or can't evaluate, anyway. A director of software development, 10 years removed from the keyboard, will have no way to evaluate whether your "The Pitfalls and Joys of Closures" talk should give you the inside track for a position, assuming he or she attends such a talk.
Personally, I think the idea of "I'd do this for personal development" is the key. For instance, I blogged for a lot of years (and still do today) because I enjoy writing, first and foremost. So any career implications were a bonus.
But if I didn't enjoy writing all that much, then starting a blog because "I think it'll help my carer somehow" isn't a path I would have recommended to a younger me. I'd say, instead, "before you start writing, figure out exactly what you want out of this content creation effort and work backward."
As for having buyers in the audience, I think this probably varies both by industry and by what you're intending to sell. For instance, if you're intending to sell courses or tools to software developers, you're in front of precisely the right audience.
If you're looking to sell labor... it's complicated. In many organizations the economic buyer, the "decision-maker" and the gatekeepers are three different people: VP/CTO, dev manager, and architect/tech lead/senior engineer, respectively. You're certainly in front of the gatekeepers (who are kind of competitors), you might occasionally be in front of the decision-maker, and you're rarely, if ever, in front of the economic buyer.
But even if you were, the economic buyer creates a system (i.e. interview/hiring process) to take care of spending his or her money. So the economic buyer would say, "wow, I like the cut of this speaker's jib, but I'd be a bad boss if I stepped on my people's normal process, so I'm not going to do that for a random person that impressed me vaguely for a little while." And the decision-maker would say, "I like that speaker, but I'd get in trouble with my boss if I bypassed the interview system and gave this person the inside track." And if either one tried, HR might have something to say about it.
It's not that these things never happen, of course. It's just that buying app dev labor is a such a well-established group buying process that it's "sticky," in the sense that it strongly resists impulse buys/opportunistic hires. And that, in turn, makes "impress them from afar at a conference" a sales/marketing channel where you're swimming very much upstream.