We Don't Just Hire Great Engineers. We Put Them on Stage. 

Most companies say they invest in their people. Xebia actually does it, and we've got the graduation caps, the trophies, and a few newly minted conference speakers to prove it. 

Where the Speaker Academy Came From 

The Speaker Academy didn't come from a strategic planning session or a company-wide mandate. It came from people who cared enough to build it. 

We want the market to see our experts as an authority in their field of expertise, and conference stages are one of the clearest places to earn that.  

Last year, a cohort of newer colleagues started hitting the conference circuit. They had the knowledge. They had the drive. What they didn't always have were the tools to make that knowledge land on a stage, to own a room full of strangers, in 45 minutes or less. 

Marcel de Vries and Rene van Osnabrugge, and Roy Cornelissen, all seasoned speakers themselves, decided to help them. 

Why We Train Our Own People to Speak 

Here's our honest take: a lot of conference talks are forgettable. They're delivered by people who know their subject but haven't been taught how to own a room. The knowledge is there. The story isn't. 

At Xebia, Sharing Knowledge isn't a line in a values document. It's one of the things we actually do. Our engineers are out there solving problems that the rest of the industry is still reading articles about. When one of them stands on a stage and tells that story, the audience isn't hearing a sales pitch. They're hearing someone who's been in the weeds and found a way out. 

But technical depth and speaking confidence don't come as a package. So, we built a program to close that gap ourselves, with our own people, using real conference experience as the curriculum. 

What the Xebia Speaker Academy Actually Teaches 

Three masterclasses. Each one targeting something specific. 

Building a storyline. A good talk isn't a knowledge dump. It has a beginning, a tension, and a payoff. We teach participants how to find that structure in their own experience. One graduate opened his talk with this: "I wrote one simple rule for my AI coding assistant. Sometimes it followed the rule. Sometimes it didn't. I blamed hallucination. I was wrong." That's not a slide title. That's a hook. 

Designing a session that people can follow. Slides should support what you're saying, not replace it. This masterclass gets into what that means in practice: visual clarity, pacing, the discipline to cut the slide that doesn't pull its weight. 

Stage presence, voice, and delivery. You can't read your way to this one. It requires rehearsal, feedback, and the willingness to be a little uncomfortable. We pushed participants through all three. 

Every session ran with direct, hands-on feedback from Marcel and the team, drawn from their own time on stage. No theory without practice. No polish without real reps. 

The Class of 2026 

These are the people who did the work. 

What Graduation Looks Like 

We didn't let this one end quietly. 

Graduation was a real ceremony: a lectern with the Speaker Academy crest, black caps with purple tassels, rolled certificates signed by the organizers, and silver star-shaped trophies engraved "Speaker Academy, Class of 2026." And an amethyst stone for every graduate to keep in the pocket as a talisman with supporting energy. 
Maybe a little theatrical, and that's entirely intentional. 

Why We Built This Instead of Buying It 

Xebia could have hired outside speaking coaches and pointed them at a handful of hand-picked spokespeople. A lot of companies do exactly that. 

We didn't, because a polished speaker talking about someone else's work is still talking about someone else's work. Audiences know the difference. When Hidde stands on stage and talks about AI coding rules, he's talking about something he built, tested, and got wrong before he got it right. You can't coach that into a communications professional. You can only develop it in the person who lived it. 

The Speaker Academy trains the engineers who did the work to tell the story of that work. That's the whole model. 

This Is What It Feels Like to Work Here 

We're not going to tell you Xebia is a great place to work and leave it at that. What we'll tell you instead is what we do. 

We build the program ourselves, from scratch, because we believe it's worth building. We put our people on stage, hand them a real trophy, and send them to real conferences to talk about real problems they solved. 

If you're a technologist who has something worth saying and you've never had a clear path to the stage, that's the gap we built the Speaker Academy to close. The Class of 2027 is going to need people like you. Let's start the conversation today.