All the books on marketing and networking say the same: you need to have an elevator speech ready for trotting as soon as you meet someone new at an event. The elevator speech – so-called because it needs to be short enough to make whilst in a lift (elevator) – is intended to convey, in a pithy manner, what you do and why you’re eminently employable.

The strange thing is, though, is that in all my years of going to conferences, not one person has made what I would regard as a decent elevator speech. Most of the time the response I receive to the question, “So what do you do?” is along the lines of “I often ask myself the same question!” Cue laughter, but it doesn’t inspire me to wish to probe any further. Or this: “I’m a consultant.”

Sometimes, the elevator speech I hear was presumably crafted whilst going from the top floor to the bottom floor in a very tall building. On a couple of occasions, the response to the question (above) has been a sales pitch in which the speaker adopts the ‘royal we’, as in “… and we’ve just launched our new product range which looks set to redefine the global market in widgets.” The speech (which is an apt term for it) goes on forever and is, presumably, designed to bore the listener into submission in order to eradicate the possibility of difficult questions.

Perhaps the reason that elevator speeches are so hardnto make is that they are impossible to get right unless you know what the person you’re meeting is likely to be interested in, and what they know already. You have to customize your elevator speech to your audience at the time. For example, suppose I tell you that I undertake Computing assessment in accordance with the CSTA K-12 Standards. If you don’t know anything about the CSTA K-12 Standards, you will have learnt precisely nothing. And even if you do know a little bit, having heard it talked or written about, you may still not realise what carrying out an assessment comprises, and therefore what skills I bring to bear on the process. It’s similar to submitting a short biography or strapline to be included at the end of an article, or in a conference programme. At the last count I had about 20 of them, and I still usually have to adapt one of them when a new assignment comes along.

So are elevator speeches completely useless? On the contrary, I think you need to develop several of them, to use in different situations, cf my 20 or so short biographies. Even before hearing the term ‘elevator speech’ I decided it would be useful to have something to say should I bump into the Headteacher in the corridor, or the Director of Children’s Services in the council offices, or whatever, and asked my team to think about this too. Depending on who it is, you need to be able to say things like, We’ve just been looking at Google Street to get an idea of what New York looks like to a New Yorker”, or “I’ve been helping the Computing staff in such and such a school prepare for an inspection.” Whatever you do, make sure that when speaking to someone who could fire you or have you fired, your answer to the question “What have you been up to?” is not “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.” That could turn out to be, in a memorable phrase spoken to me once, “career-limiting”.