How to Stand Out as a Technical Professional | Elevated You

career development engineering pre-sales technical storytelling May 20, 2025

I was chatting with a Senior Vice President of a huge tech company last week. She said to me:

"Ben, we need Unicorns"

Not the glitter and rainbows kind. Not the billion dollar startup kind. But people that have great technical skills, and great communication skills. "Unicorns".

Next day I chatted to chap who's been on the job hunt. He was made redundant so he's been looking for a job for a while.

"Ben, they just want Unicorns" he said. Same type of Unicorns.

So my message to all of you …

Be A Unicorn!

To get your next big role. To smash the role you're in. To nail that job interview. Be A Unicorn.

I saw another big round of redundancies at Microsoft this week and my LinkedIn feed is awash with similar stories at other organisations. It's an uncertain tech world at the moment. So start building your Unicorn skills now.

But how?

Build Your Technical Muscle

You've got to have great technical skills. So how do you build those:

Set aside some time.
Learn the theory. Watch videos, read articles, ask people questions.
Practice. Build out some labs. Use the tech. Break it. Fix it. Get hands on.
Use it in the real world. Get some experience on how the tech works in reality.

People in tech are great at learning tech. You know how you do it and probably do it all the time.

Build You Communication Muscle

It's just the same. Remove any limiting beliefs you have that you're "no good" at communicating. Just treat it as another skill to learn. Just like learning tech. Unicorns are in demand and you can be one.

Set aside some time
Learn the theory. Just like tech there are frameworks and best practices to use.
Practice. In a safe space, put the theory in practice. Get feedback and get better.
Use it in the real world. In meetings. Present at user groups. Make mistakes, course correct and get better.

It's no different.

Everyone can be a Unicorn. Just believe you can. Spend some time on it. Learn some techniques. Simple.

Good luck becoming Unicorns.

Hope this helps

BenP