The Importance of Clothing For The Engineer
 I'll bet that, if you are an engineer, you are thinking 'Wow, that is one weird topic'.  And certainly as a young (or even middle aged) engineer, I never thought about much about what I wore - at least in terms of style or the like. I dressed, more or less, in 'casual business' style.  But then I changed the 'type' of engineering I was involved in - I went from simply being a design engineer or, in some cases, a manager of design engineers to being a engineer who worked with clients.  Whoa!  What a difference!

Let me back up and bit and at least nibble around the topic of 'types' of engineering. And specifically let's talk about engineers who work for companies (and usually design stuff like rockets, radios, etc - stuff that gets produced by factories in general) and engineers who design buildings, power plants, public facilities and the like.

This latter group of engineers frequently are designing facilities, etc for public entities such as power companies.  They frequently are required to hold a 'Professional Engineering' license (i.e. a PE license) which is granted by the state.  They may work for a engineering company but their work is usually done directly with the end customer or client.

In this type of environment, your physical appearance (when in front of the client) becomes very, very important.  All those style pages in Esquire all of sudden become important. And for most engineers this is a bit of a jolt!  It was for me at least!

My first 30 years of engineering (in the design world) - yeah, you had to be neat - nobody likes a slob. But then a big shift - new job, new industry, and new things to learn. One of which was that I had to look good! Along with many other little lessons learned.


Bottom line - be aware that the type of engineering you do can impact you in ways you might not have expected!