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Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.
- Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted.
- Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily.
I'm going to add a couple more:
- Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to.
- Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.
These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.
So, in order to be a presenter, I must have already been a presenter?
Another good way to start is user groups: Many will let anyone speak as long as they claim to have a relevant topic. After a video or two of those, you move up until you are eventually invited into conferences that invite speakers, as opposed to ask for submissions. Even for a talented speaker, the road from one end to the other will take about 3 years, speaking at least 5 times a year.
I for one don't think is worth it at all, but I have friends that have 10+ speaking trips a year.
So, in order to be a presenter, I must have already been a presenter?
Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.
- Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes).
- Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes)
- Conference talk.
The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.
> [...]
> This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument.
Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up.
One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences.
It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.
A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that: - Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environme…
And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience.
Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b > [...] > This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument. Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run…
A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that: - Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environme…
Some of the UK Infosec conferences now have these where they pair new speakers with experienced mentors who coach them leading up to the day.
It's a good way to get new people into the speaking pool in a friendly environment and from what I've seen can produce some great talks.
Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.
As others have said, it's generally better to build up to a conference presentation through doing smaller events like user groups and maybe lightning or rookie track talks, before trying for a main track slot.