More than 200 participants from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia converge in Bangkok to further develop their public speaking and leadership skills at the Toastmasters District 97 Annual Conference 2019.
In the advent of Artificial Intelligence era, soft skills have become integral in professionals to give a more personal approach to clients and business partners. According to the January 2019 LinkedIn Learning data, there are 50,000 professional skills in the world. And when they narrowed down the 5 soft skills companies need the most, it resulted to creativity, collaboration, persuasion, adaptability, and time management. Luckily, these all five skills can be learned by joining Toastmasters.
With these soft skills in demand, no wonder more and more people are joining Toastmasters. They come here to develop public speaking and leadership skills, and they get to learn several soft and hard skills along the way, especially those five mentioned.
To inculcate knowledge and inspiration to develop these skills, and hype the District 97 Toastmasters event, international speakers were invited. Led by Mohammed al-Qahtani, ACB, World Champion of Public Speaking 2015 who delivered the plenary speech; Derek Wong, DTM, Region 13 International director, where district 97 belongs; Past International Director Poh Kim Siong, DTM; and Past District Director Tay Yiang Ping, DTM among others.
There were also workshops and parallel sessions ranging from personality development, time management, and speech crafting delivered by top-notch Toastmasters speakers. The event finally concluded with the District International Speech Contest which was won by Arnulfo S. Arniel, DTM of Bangkok Toastmasters club. He will represent the district in the Regional finals and eventually at the 2019 World Championship of Public Speaking in Colorado, USA. Mr. Arniel also won the District Speech Evaluation contest.
“I only thought good things about the conference. It was my first one and I joined without expectations. And I received tremendous value out of it.“ says Megha one of the participants from Empower Toastmasters Club. “This was my first Toastmasters conference, and I was blown away! It was a pleasure to meet and interact with great leaders. I also learned a lot from a lot of coaches and speakers, especially from our 2015 champion, and I’ll be sure to spread what I learned to the community back in Vietnam.”Phong Le of UEH-ISB in Vietnam.
Toastmastes is a world wide organization with membership exceeding 357,000 in more than 16,600 clubs in 143 countries. There are more than 40 clubs in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambosia, Laos, and Myanmar. For more information about Toastmasters in District 97, please visit our website at http://www.toastmastersdistrict97.org/, and Like our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ToastmastersD97/ for more information.
