Task A: Building a professional essence

An overall review on this workshop would be that dressing is important. In any occasions, people would judge a person from the first 10 seconds they met. The first thing anyone sees would be how a person dresses, followed by the greetings. Thus, this makes dressing appropriately to the occasion important. In this workshop, we learnt about how to dress from head to toe for each occasions in detail. Thus, we would know if we had dressed appropriately and not to offend our host because we underdressed or overdressed.

In formal business meetings, we are to dress in full business suit, long-sleeved shirt with blazer, skirt and pantiehose for ladies. Skirts would be preferred compared to pants suit. As for the men, they should be neatly attired with long-sleeve shirt and blazers, slacks and polished shoes.

There are also many other business scenes that may require us to dress differently. However, in all situations, we always have to pick out clothes wisely, it cannot be oversized or undersized. It would be best if it is nicely fitted on us. The points that we must take into consideration when determining if we had dressed appropriately would be occasion, time, place, climate, culture and expectation of the people you will meet.

The commonly found dressings for business scenes would be casual, business casual, dressy casual, smart casual, formal, black tie, black tie optional, black tie invited, cocktail attire and white tie. Casual may be just T-shirts or polo t-shirts with slacks and blouse and pant suit for ladies , it also can be as eleborate as to man to be dressed in white tie, waistcoat(vest), shirt, cummerband, black tail coat and black pants and only long gowns for ladies.

This chapter also taught us things that we must not do in any business scenes as it would extremely impolite and disrepectful to the other party. Examples would be wearing mini skirts and low cut blouse for ladies. Things we should do to make ourselves look good in business scenes would be wearing matching pants with blazers, everything should be nicely fit, should have shoes to interchange every 2 weeks, in order to keep the shoes in shape.

In general, we should be appropriately dressed for all events or situations as first impression counts.

In Part 2 of building a professional essence, we were taught about the meeting and greetings when we first saw our client. After the first impression, the person continue to judge you through the way you talk and the things you said. It also moves on to tell us how to give a shake hand professionally and ways to handle namecards with flair. We also must constantly remember that body language speaks louder than words. If your body language say " you do not care", no matter how sincere you sound, you will appear insincere.

This chapter informs me about etiquette in communicating through verbal/body language as well as through phone calls and emails.