Introducing the Presenters Training Team
March 27, 2024
Hello readers!
Here at the Conference team we’ve been hard at work in the last few months to support the organization of Judge Conferences (I hope you’ve been able to attend at least one of them recently, and enjoyed the contents), and at designing the next steps of our development.
Through our internal discussions and talks with the Program Leadership, we came up with many ideas for projects, content and tools that we want to develop.
But in order to pull this off, we need your help!
Conferences are a great opportunity for sharing knowledge, meet with existing friends, and make new friends. However, we believe that without solid presenters’ skills, sharing this knowledge wouldn’t be as effective.
We’ve investigated various avenues to train our presenters, and looked at future-proofing the conference system by training future presenters along with judges that have never presented at any seminar but would love to have this opportunity.
Today I’m proud to present to you: the Presenters Training Team.
What is the Presenters Training Team?
The Presenters Training Team will be a group of Judges that will be professionally trained on how to be great presenters, and also how to mentor and teach others about it.
Through an application form we will select diverse individuals, with a strong focus on geographical diversity, to be part of this team.
We’re offering the opportunity to participate in a training program run by Ivan Petkovic. Ivan is a professional coach that has helped many people achieve great success.
The training program will consist of 8 sessions of 1h, across 3 months, and some homework between the sessions to solidify what you’ve learned.
The curriculum is divided into two parts:
- How to create an engaging and dynamic presentation AND be able to teach others how to do it.
- Preparation: Crafting a story
- Design: Clean and digestible
- Delivery: Practice that leads to engagement
- How to give and receive feedback in a conference setting (online and offline)
- Feedback formula (how to receive and how to give feedback)
- Collecting structured feedback
These sessions will be strictly accessible only by the members of the team, due to the interactive nature of them. We expect anyone applying to be able to attend at least 6 out of 8 sessions, with dedicated allocated time and attention, but ideally all of them. Expected availability and commitment from team members is around 2 hours per week.
After the training program is completed, we will look at how to divide tasks across the group, and we expect the members to be active members of the Conference Projects (or even take the lead on some of them, or propose your own!) for at least 6 months.
In the long term, our idea is to have one Judge at every conference, for each track that is tasked with following the seminars and providing feedback/comments to the presenters.
We’d expect to be able to cover all Tier 4 conferences in 2024, all Tier 3 conferences in 2025 and to reach full coverage in 2026.
These Judges will be receiving presenter support at these conferences, while in this role.
When available, we’ll prioritize members that went through this training, but we’ll also work on training others across the globe so we can achieve enough geographical coverage.
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading so far!
Please apply through this form. The applications will be open until April 10th and we plan to contact the selected candidates for further questions shortly afterwards.
If you have any questions about this article, about conferences in general, or about the application form, don’t hesitate to contact us at conference@fabjud.ge.
We look forward to reading your applications, and even if you’re not interested in helping us on this specific project, there might be others in the future that could be interesting for you!
See you around the world!