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The game changed when I first became a manager. Can you relate? Like many women in tech, I’ve always been a high achiever, consistently rated top quartile. But, after becoming a team lead for the first time in my late twenties, I struggled A LOT! I fell into the trap of being too nice, and accommodating. As a result, I got the feeling that my team – who were mainly men – did not respect me. Delegating was super difficult, and I found myself assigning workstreams to myself consistently. I had the double duty of managing team, project and client, on top of actually doing the grunt work. I fe ..read more

I started this blog when I was still an engineering student at college. 12 years and ~200 posts later, I am still writing, albeit with a few long pauses of late. The blog was initially for me – as a creative outlet, a way to capture and catalog my thoughts, and to share my often interesting, sometimes crazy life with the world. I was an OG social media adopter, long before Instagram. It was the medium of writing that I connected with. My blog was fun, fierce and feisty – just like me – and the voice of EngineerChic was young, bold, and authentic. It inspired a community of women engineers fro ..read more

As mentioned in my last post, one of the most critical factors to achieving success in the workplace is finding sponsors – the right sponsors – who will open doors for you and actively support you as you grow. Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of the 3 critical factors for meteoric success in his book, Outliers (along with 10,000 hours of hard work and a large spoonful of luck) and Sylvia Ann Hewitt wrote a whole book about it: Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor Until lately, this was a pretty new concept for me. Looking back at my career thus far however, I can definitely ..read more

So this blog and others like it have exhausted the facts and figured about women in engineering and how wonderful it all is for us to be there. I want to talk about something I’ve experienced that gave a new spin on why companies should hire and promote female engineers. Not all female engineers will agree to this but there is something to say about the inherent soft-skills that women possess and how this can be put to use to the advantage of the project team. One of the first female engineers in the South African construction industry told me that a female engineer should always be wear ..read more

Its been a while since I posted – readers will realise that my lull in posts has coincided with my move to Johannesburg and my starting a new job in engineering consulting. The past 2.5 months at my new company have been a whirlwind of excitement. Being thrown into two projects in the midst of implementation was more challenging than I could have anticipated. Also, learning a new company’s way of operating and getting a feel of how to find and leverage the resources available always takes some time.   My new company is vastly different to my previous one: I now live in the city and take ..read more

Seeing as though I have dated not one, but two engineers, and I am constantly surrounded by (male) engineers, I seem to have become the authority on this topic. My site stats agree that this content – strange as it may be – attracts substantial traffic. So here it is: why not to date an engineer part two. As much as I hate to generalise, and agree that there are surely many engineers out there who don’t fit the mold, I have picked up certain patterns that should be considered before getting yourself involved with an engineer guy. You will not get more of his time – so get over it Whether your ..read more

An old varsity friend contacted me the other day for some advice.  He also now works in project management but as a scheduler for several projects happening on various sites. He recently had an incident where the incorrect information was communicated for the progress on one of the sites – which landed him in some hot water.  He asked how he could better keep track of the various tasks and bits of information you have to juggle and keep track of in the fast-paced world of project management 6 Top Tips for Time Management Tip 5 – Keep a tracking register If you are feeling overwhelme ..read more

This comes from my awesome engineering-student little cousin…I laughed for days. Because its so true ..read more

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