Omar

How has your career changed since you joined Arm as a graduate?

I’ve had a particularly interesting journey. I started my career at Arm as a graduate Physical Implementation Engineer in the GPU team.
After about three and a half years, I wanted a change. I moved into hardware verification in Solutions, working on a whole system rather than just one piece of IP.

I didn’t have experience in verification, but I had a conversation with the team. They could see what I’d learned and built, and that I was passionate and wanted to improve myself. I got the opportunity to make that move and it’s been amazing. It’s been challenging in every single way I’ve wanted it to be, and everything I could have imagined and more.

What advice would you give someone starting their graduate engineering career?

Just grab every opportunity you can. If you want to do something, even if there’s no existing route for it, create that route. People will actually help you and let you carve whatever path you want.
I know a lot of graduates worry that the theoretical knowledge they’ve gained at university isn’t enough. The reality is, it’s not, but that’s why you’re a graduate. You’re a graduate to learn.

You have experienced engineers there to teach you how to approach a problem, while graduates can bring new, fresh ideas and challenge existing ones.
It’s the time to experiment, learn more and figure out what you like and what you might want to do for the next five, ten or twenty years.