During my studies and the subsequent first years of my career, I was already always someone who liked to share knowledge with others and present interesting topics. This is not the only reason why my profession has developed in the direction of IT consulting. In fact, in consulting, "being on stage" is part of the daily work. You present results in front of smaller and larger groups, you become more and more of an expert on a topic, and then at some point, you slide onto the bigger stage at small and large conferences. 3,5 years ago, I joined KuppingerCole and there, giving speeches on big stages is part of the job title. It is so much fun to share and discuss exciting topics at our conferences.
My personal speaking stand-out moment
A simultaneously good and bad memory for me remains a manufacturer event in Nice. A colleague and I presented our customer project at this event. Unfortunately, at the beginning, it didn't go as smoothly as one would imagine presentations to go. The clicker didn't work properly, and we had a lot of graphics with many individual elements to them. At some point, you start slipping into a certain inner turmoil. True to the motto "The show must go on", we made the best of it, and in the end managed to still win a prize with our project. Certainly, it wasn't my best presentation, but I learned a lot from it, and I would say that since then I'm much more relaxed on stage.
That one speaker that lives rent-free in my head
Of course, there are plenty of well-known personalities in the field of TED Talks. Perhaps I'll start by defining what makes a good talk for me: It's the art of presenting supposedly ‘boring’ topics in an authentic and entertaining way. This does not mean that you have to put on a show, rather that you primarily have to get away from completely overloaded PowerPoint slides. A few years ago, I had the honor of being on stage with such a person: Veit Etzold. Besides being an author of exciting thrillers, he is also an expert in storytelling. That's exactly what you notice. He can completely take over a stage with a FlipChart and his personal presentation style. Sure, it doesn't work for every IT topic, but it's still an impressive way to get your points across.
Many personal and professional advantages
Being a speaker means wanting to share knowledge and experience with others. To transport new perspectives, and to want to enter into an engaging dialogue with others. This is exactly what it means to be a speaker. This ranges from an impulse lecture for a subsequent discussion, to the presentation of the latest results from concrete technical problems. The great advantage of being a speaker is, of course, that as a technical expert you get a feeling for how interesting the topic is, whether you were able to convey it well and, of course, you very often get additional perspectives that can complete the picture in the following questions from the audience or in the subsequent conversations over coffee.
Moving Towards #CSLS2022
At CSLS, I'm looking forward to exactly what it takes to be a speaker. Meeting the cybersecurity family again, friends, colleagues, and the special opportunity to share knowledge and learn many new things in exciting workshops, talks and discussion panels. There is nothing better than being a speaker at a conference like CSLS and being able to share new trends, great solutions, and experiences with like-minded people. Only the Cybersecurity Leadership Summit in Berlin can do that.