What does it take to have a successful engineering career today? Is it years of academic study, multiple technical certifications, and acronyms in your signature that matter above all? Or is deep technical expertise no longer as important as leadership skills, creativity, and great interpersonal communication?
Are years of formal study still required? Or can short online courses, bootcamps, and hands-on training provide enough knowledge to get to grips with current technology and therefore challenge the need for multi-year degree programmes?
If you are already an engineer, what do you need to be learning to keep yourself up to date and relevant?
This SWE Europe Virtual Inspiration Session took place on 15 December 2022.
Missed the Session? Watch the Replay
Meet the Speakers
Afiya Chohollo
VP of Engineering & Technical Program Management, Onfido
Afiya Chohollo is VP of Engineering & Technical Program Management at Onfido, a global identity verification and authentication provider. Our technology, grounded in AI, assesses whether a user’s government-issued ID is genuine or fraudulent, and then compares it against their unique identifiable features, such as their facial biometrics, to deliver remote access to online services and help financial services meet KYC and AML requirements.
Afiya leads seven specialist engineering teams that are responsible for Onfido’s core platform infrastructure, test engineering, data integrity and our client dashboards. This means that I make sure we can develop products quickly, safely and efficiently for our clients.She also leads and founded the Technical Programme Management team which is the function that has enabled Onfido to scale product and technology execution to use digital identity to verify access to millions of people.
Afiya is technical advisor at CloudFO, an early stage company building intelligent software that keeps businesses from running out of cash.
Afiya Chohollo's experience includes delivery of large scale complex programs, team development & leadership & research . An ambassador of STEM for school aged children, Chohollo is also a Governor at Copthall School has also appeared in recent publication Voices of the Shadows highlighting the careers of 51 Women in tech which was distributed to 300 UK schools.
Before joining Onfido, Afiya Chohollo was at Tesco Online Fulfilment, Morgan advanced Materials and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Chohollo holds a degree from the University of Manchester, MEng Material Science & Engineering.
Afiya’s experience is summarised in complex technical problem solving - I transform raw thoughts and ideas into roadmaps, specifications and plans, understood by all stakeholders for successful delivery and execution valued by users!
Julia Garcia
Regional Director Project & Service Southern Europe, Emerson Process Management
Julia Garcia is Regional Director Project & Service Southern Europe in Emerson Process Management, an international software company dedicated to the Automation Projects of all type of industries.
She is chemical engineer at UCM and joined Emerson as system engineer in 1989. After that she took different positions, project manager, engineering manager, operations director, and currently in her European position has around 400 engineers reporting to her. She collaborated in the launch of the 3 global engineering centers that the company has in Pune, Costa Rica and Cluj.
She has a Senior MBA by the IE Business school and a grade in GLI(global leadership institute).
She has been connected to organizations like SWE, women talent, and inspiring girls, and is strongly convinced that women can and have to impact the future and networks.
Inga Urbina
Keysight Technologies
Bio coming soon!
Rishelle Wimmer
Senior Lecturer, Fachhochschule Salzburg University of Applied Sciences
Rishelle Wimmer, MA is a Senior Lecturer in information technology and systems management at Fachhochschule Salzburg University of Applied Sciences. She studied systems analysis and operations research engineering at Cornell University. She completed graduate and post graduate studies in education sciences, psychology and sociology at the University of Salzburg. Her research interests concern the inclusion and exclusion of under-represented people in engineering education. She is a fellow at Duke University’s Identity in Computing Group; a faculty innovation fellow at Stanford University Hasso Plattner Design School for higher education; and on the board of the Ditact IT summer school for women in Austria. She is currently the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences Society of Women Engineers Faculty Advisor and a member of the SWE Editorial Board and the SWE Research Advisory Council.
