My First Non-Technical Talk
Last week, I received a call from BinusCenter Head Office, invited me to talk at a seminar on yesterday 8 November 2008. Maybe because I was a Binus alumi and also was a instructor / trainer at BinusCenter, so that they invited me. Uniquely the topic of the talk is quite non-technical. Strategy IT Career for Your Future. 
Ehm... I am a technical guy, I am not a motivator. Deliver technical talks are common for me, but for this topic, it's quite fresh for me. But it's okay, I was very excited to accept it.
The event was held at a cafe, what a very relax place. Some of the audiences are students and some are professional I think.
I delivered 2 topics there:
1. Career in IT, Get Ready!
This is non technical talk. I start with "IT is just only a part of the careers exists".
However, IT itself consists of numerous areas such as Software Development, Networking, Graphic / Web Design, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and so many more.
Furthermore, each area consists more detail sections / vendors. Let's say in Software Development, there are Microsoft .NET, Java, PHP, etc.
And one vendor itself has many technologies / products. Let's say Microsoft has ASP.NET Web App, Windows Form, WPF, etc.
What I am trying to emphasize is "we have to focus". I showed them some pictures as analogy. Choose, "becek" or "sumur". Both of them has strong and weak points.
Becek is wide but shallow. Someone might knows a lot of technologies or areas, but he can't understand them deeply. It sounds not a good option.
Sumur / well is narrow but deep. Someone might knows very little thing, but understand it deep. That maybe sound better but is there any better solution?
Can we have wide and deep knowledge like this? Of course everybody wants to be like 
sea, wide and deep but is it possible?
Of course almost impossible.
My opinion, the most feasible option is like this "kerucut / cone". Wide at the very high level, and deep in some certain area.
That's maybe we can do the best for that.
Also, I encourage the students to study hard since most students today prefer go to mall / game center rather than libraries :). Moreover, I give some tips and tricks to prepare themselves to step in IT Career.
And at last, I showed one important point "positive thinking". Think positive when you are in negative situation. I gave a mini quiz to my audience to fill some question like this.
The audiences are very enthusiast. See! They were doing the quiz I gave 
.
2. The second talk is about Technology Update of New Microsoft Technologies. Since my audiences are mix from mix background, only a few are programmer / developer, showing them Visual Studio might only make them stunned.
So, I show some "wow" demo like some cool WPF applications (Health Care, Page Turn at Photo Book) and also Silverlight applications (Singtel Race Grid Girl, Hardrock Deep Zoom, etc).
And the seminar was ended by some questions from the audience. Some of the question are technical and some of them are not.
It's quite interesting event since sometimes we have to make balance of ourselves in both technical and non-technical position .
Interesting!