Why Your Excellent Conference Talk Was Rejected

Pretty harsh with the noob, we have all been there in a very distant past, aren't we? Just accept the most promising noobs and pack them all into the same session with a navigate chair and a senior speaker ready to rescue every single talk.

You don't just drop someone without presentation experience onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands with a laptop and a projector. That's a great way to get negative reviews for the conference from the attendees.

Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.

Have done reviews for IEEE, APEC, and ACM stuff. There can be many reasons that a presentation is not accepted. Some rejects are a simple instance of subject matter not matching the scope of the symposium. Or there can be some problems with the math and other technical issues. Another unfortunate and not uncomman issue is where the English syntax and/or grammar is so poor that the meaning of the proposal is lost. And there can be the occasional submittal that is a bit before its time - it has happened to myself. Example is the IEEE (PSES and other societies) is probably at least 15 years behind the ACM on matters of software safety and test methodology. Members of the ISPCE tech committiee recently approached me about a session on software safety analysis for the 2017 symposium; yet my submittals for similar presentations were rejected at least twice during last 10 years, by this same group of people.

So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.

For a big conference (as this seems to be), yes, definitely. Partly because conferences can sadly be quite risk averse, but also because presenting is a real skill, and assuming you're already great at it and jumping in at the deep end won't help anybody.

If you are looking to get into public speaking there are no shortage of meetups desperate to get speakers booked in, on any topic you like, in almost every city in the world (try meetup.com). Once you've done one or two you'll hopefully have some video of you usefully presenting complex ideas to an audience. From there getting into a conference gets drastically easier. Spend a little time and start with that. Having some initial visibility before jumping straight to huge international conference scale is typically a requirement, and a pretty reasonable one.

I don't want to put people off public speaking; it's super rewarding professionally and personally, and we as an industry do desperately need to hear a wide variety of ideas from as many people as possible.

It's not immediately easy though, just because you're a great developer/designer/PM/other. It's famously scary, and a quite substantial skill in itself, and if you jump from zero experience to trying to present hard concepts to an audience of hundreds of people who are paying hundreds of dollars, you'll struggle, and it won't do you or your audience or your confidence any good.

Spend a little time warming up. If you're already great, waiting a month and talking at a local meetup first will just be extra practice. If you're not, you'll want to find that out in a small friendly room of nice people, not on a huge stage in a vast auditorium live streamed around the world.

Most people will bomb their first conference talk (I'm sure I did). It's best to get that experience out of the way at a smaller venue, or even get some practice recording talks or podcasts for a blog before doing it in front of a huge live audience.