Melinda Seckington
Speaker Coaching + Employee Evangelism + Workshop Facilitator | Founder at Learn Build Share
London, United Kingdom
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Melinda is an engineering leader and conference speaker with over 10 years experience of working with and managing teams of developers & managers and conference speaking. Since 2014, she has helped engineers, designers and product managers with their public speaking skills, through speaker coaching, workshops and talks about public speaking. She also works together with engineering leaders and engineering managers on how to build up internal employee evangelism & culture within their teams.
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Building Your Personal Brand: How To Stand Out In The Current Job Market
In this increasingly competitive job market, it's no longer enough for software engineers to rely only on their technical skills. To truly stand out and advance your career, you must cultivate a distinct personal brand that showcases your unique skills, values, and expertise.
But where do you start with this? What are the key things to focus on if you’re starting from scratch? From optimizing social media profiles to creating impactful portfolios and engaging in networking activities, this session will provide actionable steps to help engineers effectively showcase their capabilities and attract new opportunities.
This talk is tailored specifically for software engineers seeking to differentiate themselves and excel in the current job landscape. You’ll gain valuable insights into the principles of personal branding and learn practical strategies for crafting a compelling online presence. Furthermore, we will explore the importance of networking, mentorship, and continuous learning in building and sustaining a strong personal brand.
Empowering Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass
Hiring good people can be hard. Keeping good people can be hard. It’s made easier though if you can set your company apart as a place that people want to work at. But how do you make the community aware that that’s the case?
Employee evangelism represents a powerful strategy where employees become advocates for their company, team, and work, actively sharing their knowledge with the broader community. It’s all about raising awareness about the company – and comes from the engineering team directly. But how do we ignite engagement and encourage contributions from engineering teams? How can we empower them to discover their voices and personal brands while simultaneously building the company's brand?
This talk explores the strategies for empowering employee evangelism within your teams. It will share methods for embedding a culture of learning and sharing, offering tangible examples to inspire and guide your team in embracing this.
The Art of Talk Design
Everywhere you look, stories surround us, and everyone has something that’s worth sharing with others. As tech speakers, we need to understand how to structure our talks so they can have the best effect on the audiences we are trying to reach. How do you discover the right angle and the right story for a talk? How do you frame your story?
Within tech we know how to approach building a new product: we research our user base, we figure out what and for who we’re trying to create something for and we make sure we constantly iterate on what we’ve come up with. So why aren’t we taking the same approach for our talks?
This talk will examine how to get in the right mindset of examining your talk ideas, and will introduce a framework of how to design and iterate on your talk. It will focus on several exercises and questions to help you create the best talk for the story you’re trying to tell.
The Art of Story Design
Once upon a time… A couple of years ago… Did you hear that thing about… Let me tell you a tale… We live in a culture that lives and breathes stories, and we use and rely on them every day. Stories are part of the fabric of our lives.
As developers, we need to understand how our stories have an effect on others, how we can best tell stories to our audiences and how we can share stories about what we do.
This talk will explore the mechanics of storytelling and demonstrate the ways we can tell better stories. It will showcase several techniques and storytelling structures to help you craft more impactful talks, blog posts and conversations.
The Art of Slide Design
Who doesn’t love a pretty slide deck?
Alongside our voice and our words, our slides are an important instrument in our presenter’s toolbox. And we should learn to use them as effectively as we can. Our decks are one of the key ways to get our point across to our audiences, and we need to learn how to be as effective as we can with our slide decks.
The choices you make in your slide design directly influences what impact your story has on your audience. We can get a better understanding of slide design, by looking at design theory and understanding how we can use design principles to create more memorable and helpful presentations.
In this talk, I'll share various principles of slide design, so that you can create more compelling slides and help your audience absorb the information you’re presenting. It will examine how you can use fonts, colours, animations and more to support the story you want to tell, and create more impactful presentations.
Be A Goldfish: Building Resilience
Within tech, things change constantly. Technologies change, companies change, priorities change - in most roles you need to learn how to adapt and roll with whatever comes your way. Things will always be in flux and a key skill is learning how to deal with change and become more resilient to it.
Especially with the current state of the industry, it’s become even more important to build your own resilience and learn to become more adaptable. As managers, we need to be aware of our own emotions, reactions and behaviours, understand how we can be more resilient to change and how to help build that resilience in the people we manage.
This talk will examine the psychology behind emotions and resilience, how to recognise and evaluate your own state, and how to come up with techniques to help deal with the hardest stuff.
Refactor Yourself!
Have you ever tried building up a new habit or changing an existing one? It’s a hard thing to do, and we often fail at making new habits stick.
We find it hard to improve the design of our own behaviours, but when it comes to our code, we do know what to do. We know how to refactor to make sure that the code we have is improving without changing any unexpected behaviours. So how about we apply the same techniques to ourselves?
In this talk, we’ll look at the psychology of creating new habits, how this relates to refactoring code and how we can combine the two to drive change to our own behaviours.
Level Up: Developing Developers
As video games have become more and more complex, game designers put way more time into creating environments where players are engaged and willing to put the time and effort into learning and mastering these skills.
As engineering leaders, we can learn a lot from how games are designed to make internal experiences better, since it’s a similar type of environment we want to create: an environment where people can learn and master skills. We should make it easier for developers to understand what options are available to them, allow them to make time for learning and provide structures and processes for them to develop the skills that they want and need for future roles.
This talk will look at how to use competencies and career development frameworks to help level up developers, what types of processes you can introduce to support personal development and how anyone in a product team should be using opportunities like these to get a better understanding of what skills they should focus on.
Melinda Seckington
Speaker Coaching + Employee Evangelism + Workshop Facilitator | Founder at Learn Build Share
London, United Kingdom
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