The Most “Valuable” Talk Ever? - David Williams
13th January 2023
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Locked
David Williams
Software Engineering Manager
Talk Description
KPI's/OKR's, Speed, Quality, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Communication - the buzzword list goes on, but is there actually any point in many of these buzzwords? And what “buzzword” do I feel is the most important?
VALUE!
How often do you look at the "Value" of your work? Do you evaluate the Value of what you are doing, before, during, and (importantly!) after you do it? Do you understand your Value to your business, your department, your team, your career and even to your daily life?
This talk will teach you about "Value", from my perspective as a hiring manager and an engineering professional.
What do I look for in the candidates I interview, and how can you "sell" your Value to a potential employer to show what you bring to a business?
You can start right now to track the Value you generate each day, building-up a wealth of real-world examples that you can use to talk confidently in your career growth conversations, in interview settings, and even at conferences with peers.
By sharing my own experiences and anecdotes from a 19 year career in engineering, testing, quality and leadership, I will paint high-level pictures of some of the responsibilities I had, for you to map to your own experiences and spot the (often hidden!) opportunities to generate Value.
Come and listen to the strategies that I have used as an employee that helped me understand the context and scope of my work and team, which then helped me to start understanding how I could generate Value in that role, and how I used that to drive my career growth?
Stories like:
- How thinking about Value helped me get promoted to a "team trainer" a year into my career.
- How using Value helped me to move from a product team I didn't want to be on, to one that I did!
- How I used Value to persuade my employer to fund a 4 day training course to further my career.
- And many more similar Valuable (hah!) stories for you to think about how you too can tap into Value
What you’ll learn
By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:
- Understand different roles and responsibilities, and have ideas on generating Value in them
- Use the concept of Value to better structure your role and responsibilities on the impact you can make
- Track the Value of your daily work (I've helped 3 people to get promoted using these ideas)
- Talk confidently about Value and impact using your own examples to absolutely catapult your career
David Williams
Software Engineering Manager
Award-Winning International Conference Speaker | Software Testing Veteran | Father | Mental Health First Aider | STEM Ambassador | Humanist | He/Him
Across his 19 years in the field of engineering, quality and testing he's been a web developer, tester, senior, team lead, test manager, head of testing, and has helped businesses to build quality-centric engineering practices and a focus around delivering customer value. He's now leading mobile application engineering at Ada Health, to improve their mobile apps, and to mature their consumer domain's engineering and delivery practices.
We've also seen his award-winning talks at several international testing conferences, including TestBash Brighton, where he spoke about Mental Health in Testing.
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Tags
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career-development
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testbash-careers
