Lightning talks with David
Here at PartsTrader Markets Limited we try and encourage everyone to grow and enhance their skillsets. This includes skills like public speaking.
At some point in your life you will have heard someone, possibly even yourself, say something like the following:
“Public speaking is not for everybody.”
“I don’t like talking in front of groups of people.”
“I’m afraid of speaking in public.”
I know I’ve said them plenty of times to/about myself. From my first introduction to it in late primary school on, public speaking has been a daunting trial. A maze of self-doubt and terror. In fact it wasn’t until I attended my first Testing Conference back in 2015 that I started feeling better about talking in front of a group of strangers. No, I wasn’t one of the speakers at the Conference. Instead I was introduced to the concept of a Lightning Talk during one of the breakout sessions before being coerced into giving one.
An entertaining talk on dishwasher etiquette
By the time I made it back to the PTML Wellington office, a story for another time, we were looking at different ways of sharing what was going on around the company. A couple of us felt that Lightning Talks might be a fun way of helping with that. And initially that’s what the Lightning Talks here at PartsTrader were like, people from the various Teams would have a chance to stand-up and talk to either what they were working on, learning or solving as a part of their job here. We would dedicate up to 6 minutes of talking time to each person, and made sure we could present slides if people wanted to use them. Once the talk was over we would see if people had questions and spent some time answering those before we would move on to the next speaker.
This worked really worked well and we got some excellent talks, but over time a problem stood out: we tended to have a small set of regular speakers compared to the number of employees. While that was fine, the people presenting and attending were getting good value out of them, it meant that we had a large number of people that didn’t feel comfortable with speaking even when it was in front of a friendly audience. This clashed with what we felt that we could be using the Lightning Talks as a way to help more of our people feel comfortable speaking in public.
To help with that, we changed up what the definition of a Lightning Talk at PartsTrader was. The topic no longer needs to be related to work. We opened it up to be anything, within reason, that you are interested in. This meant that people from other areas outside of our “tech” teams started to participate as well. We still got talks on things like “Tidy, Splunk-friendly logging with NLog” or “Getting started with Docker and Docker Compose”, but now we also get talks like “Invisible Illnesses and Disabilities”, “WTF is WUU2K” and “Fighting Game Community 101”.
This influx of fresh speakers, with their new and varied topics, has also led to people wanting to try out different styles of presenting. While most will still be slide based, we have seen people try to shake things up. Some have incorporated more video or demonstrations into their presentations. A brave few have even tried to eschew slides completely in favour of a whiteboard or bringing in some styling elements from stand-up comedy. All of which people feel comfortable to try because they know they’re doing it in front of a friendly, accepting audience of friends and colleagues.
Seeing people have a go at public speaking, the energy and enthusiasm they put into crafting the presentation and then watching them overcome their nerves on the day, is awesome. Being able to open up the types of topics has meant that each session of the Lightning Talks feels different. In fact, there’s really only one major thing I feel is missing about them now - having a first-time speaker that gained their confidence from our Lightning Talks go on to present at a conference. While in person conferences are still an unknown entity in 2022, I’m hoping that very soon we’ll have our first speaker take that next step.
David Leach
Software Tester, PartsTrader