What does Business-Casual mean anyway?

Now this is a really tricky one because there is just so much that can fall into this category...A neat skirt-suit can be business-casual, and on the other hand, you can get away with dressing up a pair of jeans too! So let me start by describing what business causal ISN'T.

 What Business Casual Isn't #1:    Business Formal

A business suit you would wear to a job interview would be slightly too dressy for the business casual look. Business-formal implies a tailored suit and tie, the type of outfit you would reserve when meeting with high-end clients or attending a technical seminar (or ASME committee meeting). Here, women have a slight advantage since items such as skirt suits and dresses can be dressed up or down to fit either category depending on what you pair them with...

Take a look at this classic black shift dress with a blazer. This is perfect business-formal attire...

but pair with a trendy shirt and belt and shoes, and it changes the look entirely! Below left would definitely fall into the business-causal category. Its cute but still very neat and clean-cut.

and something every woman should have in her closet: a crisp, white shirt!

I also love the fact that you can throw on the season's hottest accessories and wear the shift to a cocktail party! Which means you get three sophisticated looks from just one item! If you want to buy a dress to wear in both business casual and formal categories, keep to natural fabrics and sober colours: black, grey, cream and beige are good.

 What Business Casual Isn't #2:   Casual (aka Scruffy)

There are plenty of occasions to wear your most comfortable pair of worn out jeans. Although I love my own pair of 100% cotton, tattered and patched jeans (ok fine, I bought them that way), they are not something I would take to a conference...at all...not even just for a conference golf day or museum tour!

Not business-casual!

 So you're clued up enough to know that torn jeans are out. But can you still get away with jeans at all? Here's the good news: yes you can! I do it all the time. But you gotta be careful to make sure they are neat, fit well and paired with a good pair of heels and a well-fitted shirt or blouse and a blazer jacket. No baggy jeans! No bell-bottom jeans! Stick to straight-cuts or skinnys. And as for tops, a neat blouse is best, but a collared polo shirt is acceptable apparently (although I wouldn't wear it). Nothing with logos! Make sure it fits well too.

Perfect for the business-casual look


As an alternative to jeans, you can try a pair of sleek, straight-cut or skinny trousers (or a slight flare of you are tall). I personally love my charcoal pair from Mango. They fit beautifully, and have the slightest sheen to them which make them also super-trendy! You can also try capris or long, flared shorts for a fashionable summer-look as an alternative to dresses and skirts. The rule with any trousers is to make sure they fit well-not too tight and not loose and bunching everywhere!

What Business-Casual Isn't #3:   Too Much Skin!

The point of many business-casual events you would attend is to mingle, network and conference in general. You want to give a give a good impression, and tartiness isn't the way to do that! Make sure you never show too much skin. On the other hand, don't be afraid of letting your femininity shine through. We are women, after all, and women have curves, women are charismatic...women draw attention. These things cant be ignored, they are part of what we are and should be embraced and used to our advantage! The idea is to use our feminine attributes with class.

Clothing should not be too tight. No cleavage should be revealed, stomachs, lower backs and buttocks (and that includes g-strings!). Try and avoid revealing bra-straps and panty-lines if possible. And lastly, keep the skirt-lengths around the knee  although exceptions do exist (you may be able to get away with pairing a neat mini with a suit jacket, stockings and closed, formal shoes).

What Business Casual Isn't #4:   What Your Grandma Would Wear!

And lastly, I know many of us are students or early career engineers, new to the working world. After years of campus life in our jeans and hoodies, w may have somehow come up with this idea that 'business' attire means boring or old. This is the area that I think we as engineers need to work on the most. "Business attire" means neat, clean and presentable, not washed out, repressed and dull! Let your personality shine through, don't hide it under layers or neo-feminist frump! 

Business casual lets you be a bit more expressive than business formal, so accessorize! Stand out, make a statement and get noticed! 

 My next post 10 Wardrobe Must-haves for any Engineer-Chic, will deal more about specific features - handbags, shoes, colour and cuts...So keep the suggestions rolling in! 

Selling Yourself: Where Engineers get it Wrong!

I have just returned from an ASME leadership training conference (LTC) that was held in Dallas, USA where I had the chance to meet a whole bunch of interesting people from all over the world.

I was busy talking about my bright pink hard hat, when I got a 'OMG, are you Engineer-Chic?

This was a real treat! Noha is the president of ASME's latest initiative, Engineering for Change or E4C. Of course, it was great connecting with other young women who are also engaged in developmental initiatives, but after exchanging business cards, the conversation drifted to lighter (yet very important) topics: clothing!

Noha is a pretty, young, middle-eastern woman who I thought looked very stylish and well put together. Iana, another awesome E4C initiator, lamented over how difficult it was for engineering women to know what was appropriate to wear to these occasions. I have to agree with her on this one.  I've been to a couple of engineering conferences where the dress-code was set to business-casual...and I know first hand how difficult it is to stock your wardrobe to accommodate both engineering 'work-clothes' and formal meeting attire and on top of all that, the elusive set of garments that fall into the 'business-casual' category. I think that we engineers have an even harder time of dressing for business-casual than business-women since we don't wear business-casual clothing to work. We wear jeans and comfortable shoes, or clothes that we don't mind getting quite dirty!

So does this mean that we have to go out and buy clothes specifically for conferences and business-casual events? 

Wait for the shocking answer...Yes it does!

I know all of your logical minds are thinking, 'But why? Why must I spend all that cash on clothes that I will wear a few times a year? Is it really all that necessary?'

And, again, yes it is necessary! Conferences and events are amazing opportunities to network and market yourself. You are an independent, strong and smart young engineer, and others need to SEE this when they look at you. First impressions always count and you will have to dress the part to get the recognition you deserve!  But for some reason, this is something that doesn't come naturally to engineers. Two key learnings from the LTC was that engineers are really bad at marketing ourselves, and that we tend to think that reason and logic are superior means of attaining power and influencing people agree with you.  But this is a complete myth- totally wrong! Just looking at the (soon changing) ASME website tells us how bad we are at selling ourselves and our products. I recommend the book Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, which has a whole section on the importance on MARKETING YOURSELF. There are multiple ways of getting and leveraging power, and one of the fastest and easiest is by being attractive!

"Now, don't go hating on me, I'm not saying you have to be pretty to use this type of power, but everyone can be neat, clean and appropriately dressed", said speaker Elaine Seat, in her talk titled: Selling Your Ideas in the Absence of Authority (aka how to get power and use it to influence others).  "Think of the money you spend on good clothes as an investment in yourself that yields unbelievably high returns!" Said Ron Rosenburg who delivered the Plenary Session: Outrageous Association Marketing.

(Hint: google this guy!)

So yes, it is extremely important to market yourselves. You will have to learn how to dress the part. This isn't easy, but I'm here to help. In my next couple of posts, I will be exploring this in a little more detail, so stay tuned. 

Can you think of some SUGGESTIONS on what would be appropriate conferencing gear in the BUSINESS CASUAL category? Comment on this post or email me with hints, tips and PICTURES!!!! 

Engineers Without Borders Student Conference!

There is something that I've been keeping a secret from the Engineer-Chic space for some time now, but now that things are actually in motion, I'm so excited to blog about it!

So a quick recap about EWB (Engineers Without Borders) in South Africa. UCT is the only university that has been engaging in projects so far, with a few of the other campuses having just pulled together a committee. The group at UCT took about 3-4 years of planning, getting people involved and figuring how to do things before they were able to secure some funding, start engaging in projects and have the university take them seriously. The other university groups are going through much of the same right now, and I just think that it would be ridiculous to leave them to figure out things for themselves! There is much to say about institutional learning, and so much that we can share with others to help them get off the ground much faster than we did!

But for this to happen, we need to get all the students together from the various Universities in SA who have already been showing initiative in EWB.

So here's the plan:

To host EWB SA's first ever national event: a Leadership Training Conference!

The conference will fly 4-5 students from 5 SA Universities (other unis/ techs will follow in time), who have already shown interest in EWB and leadership initiative to a central location. On this conference, delegates will be introduced to EWB and will attend workshops that will teach them everything they need to know about starting and running a student chapter! Skills such as how to write a funding proposal, how to select the right kind of project and how to ensure the projects you complete are sustainable, and aligned with the interests and needs of the community you're serving are just some of the exciting things we're thinking about!

The LTC will also get EWB-enthusiastic engineers together as guest speakers, mentors and stakeholders. Apart from being an awesome networking opportunity, the conference might also serve to get a whole lot of the brightest minds in engineering together, to think about EWB and to help mold and shape our organisation into the future! 

I'm so excited about this, and just know it will be an awesome success. But I want to know what you think.  Do you think this is a great idea and if you do, can you think of ideas for speakers/ themes and key skills we should include in our program?

Email Engineer-Chic with your suggestions!  

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

My First Project as an Engineer

So guess what? I have a real life pink hard hat! 

It is SO beautiful and is just the most perfect thing in the world right now.

(forgive the overreacting, but I've wanted one for ever and its finally mine!!!!!)

As you would imagine, work has been Uber busy of late. I have just completed a project concerning the throughput of our Crushing and Screening plant. The plant was designed to handle the output for two phases, but currently cant even handle Phase I's output! So I was sent in to try and locate the problem.

It was quite an interesting project, and I wish I could go into it a bit more, but I doubt my company would appreciate that very much! What was really exciting was that in order to assess the actual throughput rate of the plant, I designed and ran an experiment of colossal proportions. I stopped the entire crushing plant, and ran 400 tons of material through it! It took about 4 hours in total and a couple more to weigh everything up, but was a completely insane experience!

Having the Process Engineering Manager helping me along with a team of 8 other guys was at the same time really awesome and really terrifying! All the time I was thinking, 'OMG, I cant believe they are letting me do this. Do they know how scared I am?' And then, after an hour or two of things running shockingly well, my thoughts were, 'OMG, I cant believe I'm actually pulling this off!'

But the best part was when I got the initial results in, and they completely supported my inital idea of where the problem lay and I was all like, 'OMG, I think I just saved this company a couple million!' (thats just speculation, but I could have...just saying.)

So all in all, I'm loving being an engineer so far. Its so different to student life-very "Real World". I can actually see the effect of things that get done. People are working, really working and making things happen on this plant. Its a great study in Cause-and-Effect which puts things into perspective, especially as a recent graduate!  I'm learning so much, getting my hands dirty and meeting awesome people who are so willing to teach and guide. 

I'm currently working on my next project, which should take a few weeks to put together. 'Busy' just got a whole new meaning! 

Oh yes, and I found a new home, on an orange farm/ guest lodge, with orange orchards and dogs and river-rafting! I never thought I'd be so happy to be a farm-girl again, but this place is a dream...I know I'm gonna love my two years in Steelpoort! 

Love and Engineers

Its Valentines Day!

Isn't it just great to know there are millions of people out there that are celebrating LOVE right now?

(I really thought this was super cute)

So lets talk a little about love and engineering...Sure, we're not known to be the most romantic of disciplines, and yes, many of the engineers I know aren't naturally inclined to big shows of affection. Some, I must admit, prefer the company of machines to people (thats just a joke btw!). But everyone needs love, and everyone knows the crazy, dizzying feeling that comes with falling in love, even the most mechanically-minded of souls.

So I'm dedicating this post to all misunderstood engineers. Although I know you like to act tough, I also know that you're only human. So if you know an engineer, give them a hug today (and maybe even a kiss). 

And perhaps they'll send you one of these next year?

and my favorite...

Oh little Buggy! I just wanna eat you up!

Happy Valentines Day!

-Engineer-Chic

Africa on the Blog

I have very exciting news! I have started to blog for an amazing and incredibly awesome consortium of bloggers: Africa on the Blog-the Voice of Africa from all over the world.

Check out: www.africaontheblog.com

This diverse group of bloggers has graciously allowed me an outlet for my deep and profound love for my country and continent: Africa. 

As a fellow blogger, Naomi says in her post Dream Destinations in South Africa: Ah Africa, whats to do but LOVE YOU?

African trees silhouetted in the sunset

Since I have recently relocated from the beautiful, cosmopolitan city of Cape Town to the rural yet divinely stunning settlement of Steelpoort, I have been astounded by the breathtaking, untouched stillness of Africa! It has inspired me! See my first post: I am African .So please everyone, check out the site! Looking forward to your emails and comment (which I absolutely love receiving)!

They Made me Do It!

So I happened to stumble upon UCT Engineering Faculty's newsletter and lo and behold, what do I see? Me!

I had heard that a picture from the EWB Cookout last year had made it into the newsletter, but was quite surprised to see myself and a colleague POINTING at some high-efficiency stoves! 

How CHEESY!?!

So since my embarrassment is already all over the web, let me take this opportunity to say this: they made me do it! It's true, the photographer thought it would be a good idea if we pointed at the stoves for the picture. I still love you M.H., but really? Notice how my face is very strategically hidden by my hair?

Well, at least we go a mention on page 8! Next year, let aim for page 5 at least EWB! 

But still very happy and proud that my AWESOME project got a mention!!!