In our professional lives, making a strong impression is a valuable skill that can open doors and propel us towards career success. While the first impression is crucial in many situations, there are a few specific career moments where it matters more than usual.

Building Rapport and Likeability: The Coffee Chat

While many may think of these informal meetings as less critical than formal interviews or presentations, the truth is that making a strong first impression during a coffee chat matters more than most people give it credit for.

In the world of professional networking, coffee chats are often the gateway to valuable connections, mentorship, and even job opportunities. If you’re meeting someone for the first time this way, a strong first impression can help open the door to future opportunity.

How to Ace it: First of all, don’t come into the conversation asking for favours. Take the opportunity to listen to the other person’s story, and ask questions to probe deeper and show that you’ve been paying attention. Reciprocity is a powerful force; if someone feels you’ve taken a genuine interest in them, they’re much more likely to return the favour. As a bonus, asking questions and letting the other person do most of the talking means you’re more likely to stumble across common ground that you can use to build positive rapport with the person.

Showcasing Expertise: Your First Presentation

Your first presentation to internal stakeholders is one of the most important moments in your relationship with those individuals. The first presentation is where people will come to view you either as someone worth listening to, or someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No pressure, right?

How to Ace it: Start by knowing your material better than anyone else in the room. Knowledge is confidence, and confidence comes across in presentations. Try to anticipate all of the likely questions that could come up throughout your content, and prepare the answers to them ahead of time.

Once you know your content, practice how you’re going to deliver it. Build your key messages from the perspective of the audience, and what they care about most. If you know the material and customize the delivery in a way that prioritizes the needs of the audience, you’ll do well, regardless of who or how many people you’re presenting to.

Thought Leadership & Charisma: Conference Presentations

Presentations to a large group of individuals are a special sub-species of presentation that warrants its own section. Large presentations like this are a double-edged sword, in that they can either be massively beneficial for your personal brand, or massively detrimental.

As an example of the latter, I once witnessed someone speak for about 30 minutes in front of hundreds of people, when they were only allocated 7 minutes of talk time. Holding aside the question of why nobody intervened, do you think the rambling that ensued helped the individual’s reputation?

Spoiler alert: it did not.

How to Ace it: knowing your material is as important here as for smaller presentations. Rather than preparing for detailed questions though, the emphasis here is more on your delivery. You want to practice to make sure that your tone, pacing, and body language all tell the same story, which is that you’re someone worth listening to. My next post will go into more details about how to deliver a killer presentation.

Readiness for Promotion: The Skip-Level Project

Maybe your current boss left the company. Maybe your boss’s boss wanted to give you a stretch project. Somehow though, you’ve done it: you’re working directly with your two-up manager. It’s an incredible opportunity, and one that can either propel you forward in your career, or hold you back instead.

How to Ace it: More important than anything else is your mindset. You need to go in with the intention of giving 150% on this work. Your goal is to overdeliver to the point that your two-up has no choice but to say “Wow, this person is really on top of things. Maybe they’re ready for the next level.”

With the right mindset in place, start with a plan. What do you need to deliver, and what inputs do you need in order to make it happen? Get those inputs in order, and get delivering. Along the way, make sure to keep your leader informed of progress, as well as any potential barriers than you need their help to clear away. The last thing you want is to sit on obstacles, or try to clear them yourself with no luck, until your leader has to ask what’s going on. Show passion, proactivity and leadership, and you’ll set yourself apart as someone who can be relied on to get things done.

Raising Your Hand: Taking on Extracurriculars

Volunteer opportunities are a great way to set yourself apart from your peers. Extracurricular projects can give you exposure to leaders outside your main reporting structure, and give you the opportunity to network and make an impression on people in your company that you might not otherwise get exposure to.

How to Ace it: First off, don’t wait until someone voluntells you to sign up for an extracurricular. Be the one to raise your hand by choice, and it will reflect well on you.

Second, be strategic about which extracurriculars you sign up for. Try to avoid task forces or committees where you’re asked to spend a lot of time for not a lot of impact. Where possible, you want to flip that script. You’re looking for relatively low-effort, high-impact work that will give you visibility to as many people as possible. After all, it’s hard to make a positive impression if nobody knows you’re even doing the work, right?

Finally, don’t think about the work as second-rate next to your day job (even if it’s true). Remember this: you’re making first impression with a whole bunch of new people. This work is an important opportunity to make that count, so make sure you give it your all!

Wrapping it Up

You’ll notice I didn’t mention any of the cliché first impression opportunities here: interviews, first day of work, etc. That’s on purpose. There’s TONS of content out there that covers these off, and I wanted to focus on these other moments that are no less important.

By recognizing them for the opportunities they are ahead of time, you can prepare accordingly to make sure that your first impression in each setting is a powerful one.