How to Improve Public Speaking Skills for Engineers

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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 worked. I did my job and did it well.

Then I joined a startup where hiding wasn’t an option. The whole company was five people. I was one of two developers. I had to form opinions on our technical direction and defend them, and the CTO told me directly that I needed to speak up more.

A few things happened once I did. I took more pride in my work. I said some cringe-worthy stuff, lived through the mini-anxiety attacks, and got better. To my own disbelief, I’m now an engineering manager whose job is largely speaking to groups of developers and leading presentations, online and in person.

Here’s why this is worth your time:

Leadership. Communicating ideas clearly, influencing decisions, and aligning your team are core leadership functions, and they matter more the further you climb.

Visibility. Speaking lets you show your expertise, build a reputation, and connect with people who open doors to better roles.

Durability. As automation absorbs more routine technical work, skills rooted in human interaction and judgment are far harder to replace.

The good news is you can build this deliberately, in low-stakes steps.

Record yourself. Use a screen-recording tool to walk through your work, explain a concept, or narrate your code. You can edit, re-record, and over-think it as much as you want. That’s the point. It gets you comfortable on camera before the stakes are real.

Volunteer for demos. Next time you ship a feature or fix a bug, ask your manager for a short time slot to walk the team through it. No format for that on your team? Suggest a monthly lunch-and-learn and kick it off with a 15-minute lightning talk on something you know.

Start small—really small. If your anxiety is spiking, don’t jump into the deep end. In your next meeting, ask one question. Write it down beforehand if you have to. Then be the first to break the awkward silence when someone else asks one. Developers are a famously quiet bunch, so it doesn’t take much to stand out.

The further you grow, the more you’ll be expected to hold opinions and voice them publicly. So start now. Record yourself, ask questions, get uncomfortable, and notice that it gets easier every time you do it.

—Brian

Salome Mikadze-Struk built her tech company Movadex as an undergraduate student at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—then kept it running during the outbreak of war in her native Ukraine. Now, she’s channeling what she learned into mentoring tech founders and speaking about the importance of resilience as AI upends the software industry.

Read more here.

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