What a school can ask a visiting speaker for
A professional visiting a school to talk about their work is a rare and valuable hour. Most of it is wasted on a lecture nobody asked for. What to ask the speaker for instead, so the students leave with something.
Schools invite working professionals to speak to students more often than they realise, and get less from it than they should. The speaker, unsure what is wanted, prepares slides about their industry. The students, unsure why they are there, sit through them. Everybody is polite. Nothing changes.
The difference between that hour and a useful one is what the school asks for. This is a list of what to ask.
What you should come away with
- Ask for a normal day, not an overview of the industry
- Ask for the path, including the parts that did not go to plan
- Ask the speaker to leave most of the time for questions, and prepare the students to ask them
- Ask what they earn, roughly — students want to know and nobody tells them
- Ask what they wish somebody had told them at the students' age
Ask for a normal day. Not what the industry is, not its history, not its future — what the speaker actually did last Tuesday, from arriving to leaving. Who did they talk to, what did they produce, what went wrong, what was tedious, what was satisfying. Students cannot picture a profession from its description. They can picture it from a day. This single request turns most speakers from lecturers into storytellers, because everyone can describe their Tuesday and almost nobody has been asked to.
Ask for the path, and specifically ask for the parts that did not go to plan. Students assume adults in good jobs chose them at sixteen and proceeded in a straight line. Almost nobody did. The speaker who says they chose their stream because of a friend, failed something, changed course after a degree, took a job they did not want and found the one they did — that speaker gives students permission to not have it figured out, which is the thing they most need at fifteen. Ask the speaker in advance to include this. Left alone, most people tidy their story.
Ask the speaker to talk for twenty minutes and answer questions for forty, and then do the work that makes that possible: prepare the students. A room that has not been prepared produces silence and then one brave question about salary. A room where each student has written down two questions beforehand — what is the hardest part, what would you change, what did you study, do you need to be good at mathematics — produces a conversation. The questions are where the value is; the talk is only there to start them.
Ask about money, plainly, and tell the speaker you will. Students want to know what a profession pays and nobody tells them, so they guess from films and hearsay. A speaker who says 'roughly this at the start, roughly this after ten years, and here is what it depends on' has given them a piece of information they will not get anywhere else. Most professionals are willing if asked in advance and told the reason.
Ask what they wish somebody had told them at the students' age. It is a question every speaker can answer, the answer is always specific, and it is nearly always the thing the students remember.
Ask for honesty about what the job is not. Every profession has a version students imagine and a version that exists. The speaker who says 'people think this job is X; most of it is actually Y' has done more for the students' decision than any amount of enthusiasm.
And ask for nothing else. Not a motivational message, not advice about hard work, not a pitch for their company or their course. A visiting professional's value to a school is that they are real. The moment the session becomes a talk about success, or a sales pitch, that is gone. This is why GullyFuture's speakers agree in advance that a session is not a pitch, and why we would rather lose a speaker than break that rule.