Unique professional, personal benefits await PNSQC speakers
PNSQC is seeking speakers of all experience levels and backgrounds to contribute to our conference program. Speaking in front of your peers offers benefits far beyond what a general attendee comes away with.
Past presenters helped us compile this list of opportunities unique to presenting:
- You will speak at one of the top software quality conferences in the nation
- You can promote yourself and your skills
- You will work with colleagues on your professional level technical paper
- You will gain invaluable public speaking skills in a supportive environment
- You get free admission or discounts to our conference
- You can network with your fellow speakers and learn from them
- By researching your topic and practicing your speech, you will stay relevant in a quickly changing profession
Rex Black, the founder, and CEO of RBCS, a Texas-based consulting company, is a huge advocate of speaking at professional conferences.
What specific benefits does Rex derive from speaking at PNSQC? Here are three big ones:
Public Exposure
“One of the major benefits of making a professional presentation is that it gives you exposure to the people you want to reach. Unlike writing a book or an article, you actually meet people. A presentation lets me have a conversation in real time about their specific problem. I can give them ideas and say, ‘This is one of the services we offer.’ It’s the self-initiated cold call. In other words, these people chose to hear me speak or to attend a webinar. I didn’t have to go looking for them.”
Remaining Relevant
“One of the challenges in consulting is staying relevant and current. If I just wrote books, without interacting with clients, I would be totally irrelevant in 18 months. Presentations, along with my regular consulting work, help me stay in touch with the testing problems and best practices that are out there. Because I do this internationally and because we are not in any way business domain or technology specific, I get a really broad exposure to what goes on from a testing point of view.”
Troubleshooting the Industry’s Major Challenges
“Presentations offer an opportunity to address challenges in the profession. For instance, there’s an ongoing problem that we have that can be solved in the short term if we can all get on the same page. Well-established best practices for engineering and testing exist. We see companies, such as IBM, adhere to these practices and turn out some very good products. But, too many other companies essentially ignore these best practices. We have reached the point today where the best practices versus the typical practices are 40 to 50 years apart. Presenting at a conference offers me the opportunity to bring up these kinds of lingering issues before an audience who can do something to change that.”
With all these benefits to speaking, all you need now is an idea for your proposal. Take a look at the conference tracks to see if they spark your interest.
PNSQC’s mission is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. But we can’t deliver on that mission without the participation of our speakers — the heart of our conference.
