Why Public Speaking Skills Are Worth Investing In

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!You want to become a senior developer. A CTO, maybe. Start your own company, perhaps. Or maybe you just want to land your first role in tech.You will not get there from raw engineering skill alone.There’s a skill that’s quietly essential to technical leadership and yet consistently overlooked: public speaking.If you’re anything like I used to be, you’re already listing reasons not to. “I got into this to code, not to give presentations.” “I don’t want to lead.” “I’m too junior to speak about anything.” No, no, and no again. There’s a ceiling on the return from technical skill alone.I was terrified of public speaking for the first three years of my career. I wanted to hide behind code, and for the most part it work