Speakers and presenters of all types: do you keep a list of past and future speaking engagements online?

You should. A speaker resume is an easy tool to grow your career and get better speaking engagements.

Conferences care about your speaking history

If you submitted a presentation to the SQL PASS Summit this year, you were asked to enter your speaking history.

Why?

When you run a large conference, it’s hard to know every single speaker who applies. If speakers provide their history and a biography, it’s easier to recognize people. If speakers provide a biography that lists their blog and an online speaker history, it’s much easier to get a sense of how long the person has been speaking.

Future employers care about your speaking history

Do your future self a favor– record all the hard work you’re doing now. If you’re presenting on one or more topics at online events or conferences, that says a lot about you.

Your speaker resume helps the community get to know you

We meet a lot of people at conferences, and we read a lot about people online! It’s hard to keep people straight, especially for new people entering a community.

Keeping a public record of what you speak on and where really will help community members understand who you are and what you’re interested in.

Your speaker resume will help promote conferences

When you’re going to appear at an event, you should blog about it and link to the event. This gives a little extra search engine mojo to the event creators, and it may help out people figuring out if they should attend, as well.

Don’t have a blog? Create one just for this.

Good news: you don’t blog about other topics if you don’t want to. If you’re a presenter, you should at least have a simple blog listing where you’ll be. It’s free, it’s quick, it’s easy. You can make the title your name and the subtitle “The Presenting Adventures of a Database Addict,” or something more reasonable to let people know you’re only blogging about your speaking dates.

How to create a speaker resume

If you’ve already got a blog and you write posts on different topics, here’s how to create your speaker resume:

• Create a page called “Events”
• Add heading that says “Upcoming Events” and one heading that says “Past Events”
• Enter in your upcoming events
• After you complete events, move them down to “Past Events”.

That’s it! That’s all you need to create your speaker resume.

Optional items for your speaker resume

• Add a summary paragraph at the top of the page explaining what topics you speak on, how long you’ve been speaking, and what groups you speak for.
• If you have dates and locations for past events, put those in.
• If not and you can summarize a year or a set of years with a general number of presentations, audiences, and topics, that’s great, too.

This is all icing on the cake. You’ll notice I’m a slacker and I haven’t done all this– I just started my page last year and have done my best to get things on it after that point. But you can certainly outdo me.

Don’t make maintaining your speaker resume too difficult

Use abstracts and content you’ve already written, and do your best to keep it updated— design the page so it isn’t very time consuming.

I like to remove some information from past events and just keep the title, topic, location, and some comments on the event, but this is more effort than you really have to put in.

Do you keep a speaker resume?

Do you have tips to share which I’ve missed?