Why Tech Talks are Important

Boost your career growth by actively participating in Engineering Tech Talks. Learn about benefits and how to start.

Today’s article I will be sharing why presenting at tech talks is important for you and how it plays an important role in your career growth. Lets first see what tech talks are: Tech Talks are deep technical discussion forums within the organization or company, the purpose is to share knowledge across teams so they can better work together in the long run along with a lot of other benefits.

Lets look into some important aspects (usually happens in the order) that come along when you present in tech talks:

💡The main goal is to help other teams while reaping the individual benefits

Share Knowledge

A great platform to share your knowledge, either in general, about a system or anything that follows your tech talk guidelines, this gives you the opportunity to share your work so other teams can benefit from it. There are great benefits to knowledge sharing in general.

Instant Recognition

This is definitely one of the biggest benefit, it gives you and your work the recognition that you may be looking for which helps in your performance review cycle.

Make Connections

A chance to make good connections, interacting with new faces, seeking feedback, finding common problems are few great way to grow your network. The more people benefit from you, the more vital you become for the company.

Build Trust

Great opportunity to build trust across the company, if you have solved a problem for others, you will gain Social Capital points, learn more about the Social Capital by The Caring Techie.

Cross Collaboration

Once you build trust, you unlock a great potential to do cross team collaboration work to solve common problems, this gives opportunity to work on bigger scope and impactful projects.

Grow Yourself

In the end, it not only gives confidence and feedback for your work but also plays an important role in your promotion, most companies’ career ladder require active participation to get to a Senior Level. Read more how to be a Next Level Senior Engineer.

Tech Talks have also great and some overlapping benefits for the attendee, just read the above from the attendee perspective and you can get started, although the impact would be lower but a great way to start and build confidence.

Apart from that, I would like to emphasize couple of things:

• Prioritize attending tech talks, don’t skip for no reason

• Come up with work and present (alone or with a team), beat imposter syndrome

• Turn your tech talks into company blog posts or generic version on your personal blog, e.g. Self Serve Data Engineering Pipelines

In short, I encourage everyone to attend, participate and contribute to Tech Talks, if your company is small and does not have one, its a great opportunity to start, own and lead it.