Please suggest topics for a school talk

[CookieDoughKid]

I've been invited by TeachFirst to deliver a 1hour talk to a Secondary school, yr 10 children of any topic. I'm not a teacher, I'm a tech professional with 20 years industry experience working for some of the most visionary companies in the world. Any idea what might be inspiring or what might be of interest as a topic? I'm NOT a great speaker but happy to talk around subjects if I prep well for it or simply give a talk on what's it like working for these companies where it's not a 9-5, there are no fixed desks and yes we have ball pits and games rooms for adults. I was thinking about maybe do a bio about me (extremely poor social background) and being female, knowing the statistic is less than 17% women working in tech. However I think that might be boring, and they may have heard and seen it all before. For corporate insights, the truth is that working for these top tech companies is very tough and they expect hard work and commitment. Not unlike any other jobs really but it's not for the faint hearted. I want to be truthful but not off-putting. Any ideas....much appreciated...I'm open to suggestions.

My year 10s are mostly interested in themselves and have the attention span of gnats. In order to engage them for an hour you’ll need to work very hard (sorry!).

I would go in quite visual and, if at all possible, interactive. Relate to them and their lives. Technology is very attractive, obviously. Can they have an “exclusive” glimpse into the future?

Could you integrate a little quiz so they are involved? Like guess the company by starting with an obscure clue and working up to more obvious ones. It's good to stop every now and then and get them interacting as l hour is long.
Stories are good to keep them interested so your personal story is a good idea.
You probably know this already but very little writing on a power point and very few notes if any.
So break it into sections interspersed with their involvement and keep it light at times with anecdotes to waken them up again.
I'm thinking if you had a little personality test so they could find their strengths but not sure if that could mislead them as regards careers if that makes sense.
Time for questions here and there.
They will probably be glad to be having something different so will be fine.

what about the rise of robots. Start telling them they might well be the last generation to have teacher in flesh and blood and from there move to other professions. So after 20 min of explanation at why, start taking examples from them on professions, so a journalist, a lawyer, even a radiologist and ask them to come up with why such job could be done by AI
Look for Martin Ford's book.

Agree that it should be interactive, so have a true/false quiz at the start (they show red/green cards) about your subject and then a summative quiz at the end to see if they've been listening. My kids like videos so break it up with one or two of those...

That's great. Thank you so much for the advice and making it interactive! I didn't think of that but agree, death by powerpoint would be dreadful.

I did talks like this at a mates school and the advice he gave me was "kids like big numbers" - so tell them about a big project, number of engineers, number of lines of code, cost.

With your tech background I would focus on that. Start out with some images of old tech like floppy discs, the first computers, cassettes, early games consoles like Binatone- things they can relate to. Do multi choice to date when they were introduced. Work from that timeline to modern equivalents, then look towards the future. You can talk about exciting projects in the making, big data (link to social media), the 3rd revolution and how it may affect their careers in the future. Loads of photos, videos etc to keep them engaged.