Customer Reviews

The New Professional Image: From Business Casual to the Ultimate Power Look

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If you are looking for a comprehensive guide to making a positive impact through appearance, this is your book. I am a recruiter with a Fortune 100 company in the US, and a professional image consultant recommended this book to me when I originally began my position. As a person who was looking for solid guidelines around professional dressing, as well as a reference for others who are looking to improve their appearance, I have found no other book to be comparable.

There are many aspects which make this book such an important resource for professionals:

1. The author provides specific guidelines around what items should be in a professional wardrobe, even going as far as to outline what quantities are particularly helpful of each piece of clothing.

2. The book is filled with "before and after" pictures, which allow the reader to see first-hand how the author's recommendations can make a startling appearance alteration.

3. To reflect the variety of workplace formality levels, there are six levels of workplace dress covered in the chapters. For those people who work for companies that have never successfully defined "Casual Friday", this book gives a lot of great hints of how to dress casual but still remain professional.

4. Two separate chapters outline accessories and generic grooming guidelines, and I have only found those hints in this particular guideline book.

5. For people looking to improve their wardrobe on a limited budget or a first job out of school, the author does not suggest spending a fortune on designer clothing. Rather, she suggests some key pieces to acquire first, and then others that can be obtained after your finances begin to improve.

Overall, I see the negative impact every day in my position from candidates who do not make the extra effort to go from "dressing up" to "looking professional". I strongly suggest that you make the $15 investment in this book, since it could help you to acquire the high paying career of your dreams!

I am currently beginning my second career and needed the Zero to 60 information, now, to level the playing field. You may think, gee, this guy should know all the rules--but my first career was 25 years in the military. Susan Bixler and Nancy Nix-Rice have me confident that when I walk into the interview, I will have the external factors covered (the first 30 seconds)--they even give you hints on how posture, speak, and express the internal you--your knowledge, skills, and ability. I notice people much more now--I look for the suit and tie color, suit make, belts, shoe style, etc., to see the type client the individual is playing up or down to. If you're at all uncertain--this is your next book--you will not be sorry.

As a young woman entering the workforce, I recognized the need to make a strong first impression. What I lacked was the concrete rules to pull this off. This book is outstanding! Given to me as a present, it will surely serve as my dressing bible for years to come. I was especially helped by the dress/grooming guidelines given for specific occasions and the tips for creating a more polished overall look.

Just be forewarned that the women's photos show fashions which are about five years out of style, but the overall ideas are still applicable to everyday life. Men's fashions are a lot more constant so their section is still current.

This book is an excellent guide to dressing for the workplace regardless of where you work. I especially liked the sections on business casual (for both men and women). This section helped me to see that, though I am a manager in my firm, I was dressing like the delivery man. There are so many options for dressing these days and dress has become so casual that we lose sight of the impact that our clothing has on others and the subtle signals we send. The authors do an excellent job of demonstrating how important dress is, especially for women. And, it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg to dress well, it just takes conscious buying and this book as your guide. If you feel like you are not making the impact at work and maybe in your life that you would like to make, get this book. Perhaps your appearance is sending a different message.

It seems that in our ever-increasingly casual society, we have lost some of our common sense when dressing for the office. This book has no surprises - there are no hidden secrets for compiling a work wardrobe - if we put a bit of thought into it, I'm sure most people could determine on their own that belly tops, sandals, frayed jeans, see-through blouses and poor grooming are potentially career-limiting moves.

The information in this book is pretty basic. Save your money - you can probably get this quality of advice from Mom - for free.

The new Professional Image is even better than the 1st edition. Packed with advice in an easy-to-follow format, this is one business book that you actually can't put down! I loved it and have both given and recommended it-- even making my company purchase it as one of their training guides. Best of its kind! ***** stars....