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Nadine Ho, born and raised in Kota Kinabalu, was one of the first women Shell Malaysia sent to work offshore. When she began working offshore in the North Sabah assets in 2001, the number of women in offshore roles was still limited, and she was frequently among the few women on site.

Today, she leads one of Shell Malaysia’s largest engineering teams, overseeing important contracts and a crew of 24 engineers.

This International Women’s Day, Nadine, who made history on Malaysia’s first deepwater tension leg platform (TLP) has a message for every woman in Sabah who has ever wondered whether a seat at the table was meant for them.

When grit meets determination

As a young girl, Nadine, who currently holds the Reliability and Rotating Equipment Manager post based at the One Shell Square in Miri, Sarawak, attended St Agnes Primary School and later All Saints Secondary School, and was, by her own description, fairly good at maths and physics.

She was also a competitive athlete who represented Sabah at the Malaysia Games and won a silver medal in discus throw. Sport, she says, taught her something that no classroom could.

“Being involved in competitive sports taught me discipline and structure. Those skills have stayed with me throughout my career,” she said. 

Engineering was the door she chose. Medicine was the other option, but it was not financially within reach.

A scholarship from the Sabah Government took her to the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, where she completed a first-class honours degree in mechanical engineering. She then stayed on to pursue a master’s degree in management and finance, graduating with distinction.

Her father passed away from cancer when she was 19. Her mother, who worked at the Inland Revenue Board, raised Nadine and her sister on her own from that point.

Where confidence was tested and proven

She joined Shell in September 2001 as a rotating equipment maintenance engineer and almost immediately found herself working offshore on the North Sabah assets.

The work was ground-level and demanding. Fault troubleshooting, preventive maintenance, equipment upgrades, leading contractors and technicians, managing site safety.

She was, more often than not, the only woman on the platform. She was also, by the time she was a few years in, managing major rotating equipment contracts.

People sometimes ask her how she handled being the only woman in the room, on the rig, in the meeting. She gives an honest answer.

“How you handle situations like that really depends on the context. You need to be able to read the room and respond accordingly. Having courage and not overthinking things helped me navigate those environments over the years. One of the biggest challenges was having to continuously prove myself and navigate barriers that were not always obvious or visible,” she said. 

She credits her mother as her steadiest source of strength, along with a handful of colleagues who believed in her early and whose support, she says, never left her even after they retired.

The platform that made history

In 2012, Nadine joined the team working on what would become the most defining chapter of her career. The Malikai (MLK) TLP, a deep-water project off the coast of Sabah, was Malaysia’s first of its kind.

She joined during the bidding phase, before a single contractor had been selected and watched the project grow from numbers on paper to the first cut of steel, to a platform being towed offshore and installed in waters far from shore.

Over those years she moved through numerous roles as the project demanded. She was at the onshore fabrication yard in Pasir Gudang. She developed and executed the commissioning plan. She led a multidisciplinary team of engineers and contractors through the startup of every system on the platform. And then, in a moment that required her to step well beyond anything she had done before, she was asked to take on the role of lead commissioning engineer offshore.

“I did not have prior commissioning leadership experience, and it was a huge responsibility,” she said. 

The team ran into trouble during commissioning phase. There was no clean answer waiting in a manual. What followed was the kind of problem-solving that only works when a team trusts each other completely, thinks clearly under pressure and refuses to give up. They worked through it. First oil came four months ahead of schedule, within budget, setting a new standard for deepwater engineering in Malaysia.

“We had an incredible team. Many have since moved on to different careers, some even outside Shell. Being part of a team that made history, MLK being Malaysia’s first TLP, is something I remain deeply grateful for. Did I plan every step to get there? Absolutely not. But I am incredibly proud of what we achieved, and thankful for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities Shell provided to a small-town girl like me,” she said. 

After MLK, she went on to lead the Discipline Engineering team on a second major deepwater facility, the Gumusut Kakap floating production system, overseeing rotating equipment, instrumentation, controls and electrical across the asset. Two of Malaysia’s most complex offshore platforms, back-to-back. She was the person they trusted when the work was difficult.

Returning with new purpose

By 2020, Shell gave Nadine a role that stretched her in a different direction entirely. She was no longer troubleshooting a compressor at two in the morning or making decisions from a platform deck off the Sabah coast.

Now she was shaping how engineering expertise was delivered to Shell assets spread across the world, a function that relied not on being physically present but on the harder, quieter work of building trust and credibility across distances and time zones.

It meant learning a new kind of leadership. The authority she had earned on a rig deck could not simply be carried into a conference call with senior leaders in numerous geographies. She had to earn it again, differently, through influence and relationships and the steady quality of her thinking.

“Introducing new ways of working means making sure that when change happens, the quality of delivery does not slip,” she said. 

Today she is back in the region she started in, carrying the weight of everything those two decades built. She now oversees operations that support Sabah energy assets. She also guides a team of 24 engineers, helping them grow their technical capabilities and professional confidence.

Your future is bigger than you think

When Nadine talks to women from Sabah, whether at schools, universities or community events, she hears the same thing again and again. Not that they lack ability.

Not that they are not ambitious. But that they genuinely struggle to picture themselves in the careers she has built, because they have never seen anyone who looks like them doing it.

“What stands out to me is not one specific conversation, but a recurring theme. Many young women do not see technical or leadership careers as ‘for people like them’. Representation matters because it quietly expands what feels possible. When young women see someone from a similar background working in traditionally male-dominated fields, it reframes their own ambitions,” she said. 

She believes the change needs to start in the classroom and it needs to go further than exam results. What women need most, she said, is not just knowledge. It is the confidence to step forward when they do not yet feel ready.

“Education should place more emphasis on building self-belief, curiosity and exposure, not just academic achievement. When women are taught that uncertainty is normal and that they are capable of learning as they go, they become more willing to step into challenging fields. That mindset shift can be life-changing,” she said. 

She also has a word for the version of herself that was 19 years old, newly without a father, holding a scholarship and a question mark about what came next.

“Whatever you choose to do, you will be alright. You do not need to be fearless or certain to begin. Just be willing to learn, keep going and trust that your path will unfold,” she said. 

On what she does to fill her free time, Nadine said she has taken up golf but she has absolutely no natural talent for it, calling it probably the second hardest thing she has ever taken on, after starting up the MLK TLP. 

The comparison is made lightly, but the point behind it is real. She chooses hard things. She stays with them. She finds a way to enjoy the process, even when it is slow and the outcome is not yet clear. It is, in many ways, the same mindset she hopes to pass on.

She hopes for a Sabah where more young people get that feeling early. 

Where the doors feel open before anyone even reaches them. Where a girl sitting in a classroom in Sabah can look out at the world and find, somewhere in it, a face that looks like hers, doing something she had not yet thought to want for herself.

Happy International Women’s Day.