What it’s like to be a graduate in Equinor

Daniel moved to a new country and into a job where much felt unfamiliar. Tonje left a discipline she knew well to start again in another. As graduates at Equinor, both discovered that you don’t need to have all the answers. But you do need to dare to ask the questions.

Exams are finally over and passed, and then the first day at work arrives. Suddenly you are sitting in meetings where people use words and abbreviations you have never heard before. The tasks are real, the decisions have consequences, and your colleagues have spent more years than you have been alive building their expertise.

It is easy to feel that you should understand more than you do.

That was true for both Daniel and Tonje.

In the summer of 2025, Daniel moved from England to Norway to join Equinor as a graduate. A new country, a new culture and a new workplace waited for him. He had to figure out the job, and his own place in it.

Daniel studied mechanical engineering, but in Equinor he started working with exploration drilling, a field that had fascinated him for a long time. Where other engineers can see what they are working on, drilling takes place kilometres beneath the seabed. Daniel and his colleagues can analyse data, interpret measurements and plan carefully. But they can never see with their own eyes what is waiting below ground.

“It’s a bit like an enigma or a mystery. You are looking for something without knowing for certain what you are going to find,” says Daniel.

Daniel studied mechanical engineering, and when he began working with drilling, much of the discipline was new to him. In some meetings it could be difficult to follow both the language and the context.

“I remember sitting in some meetings thinking: ‘What are these people actually talking about?’” says Daniel, laughing.

But that didn’t mean he had to stand on the sidelines and wait until he was ready.

When questions become part of the job

At first, Daniel tried to read up on things on his own after work. It helped a little, but he quickly discovered that the most important learning happened at work.

“You can go on courses and read a lot yourself, but the biggest development comes from working on actual tasks and getting help from someone with more experience.”

He learned from the project, technical leads and colleagues in the team. And he learned to ask more precise questions.

“If you’ve got questions or you’re wondering about something, there’s someone you can ask. I didn’t feel alone with the tasks,” he says.

Gradually, abbreviations began to make sense and the tasks found a clearer place in the bigger picture. But it didn’t happen in a week or a month. Daniel estimates that it took more than three months before he began to understand how the different pieces fit together.

Finding your place in a new country

For Daniel, the transition has been about more than a new field of work. He has also had to find his place in a new country.

Music has been an important part of his life for a long time. As a child, people expected him to be good at different sports because he was tall. But sport never really became his arena. Music did.

Over time, he began to see some clear similarities between learning an instrument and starting a new job in a new country:

What if you want to try something completely different?

The graduate programme can give you the opportunity to try another discipline through a rotation. Tonje started as a geologist, and when colleagues talked about well planning and drilling, she realised she lacked the foundation she needed to follow the discussions.

Her curiosity was sparked. So she decided to ask if she could rotate into drilling and wells. The request was granted, and suddenly she was working as a completion engineer.

“Suddenly they were calling me an engineer. I am actually a geologist, so I had to start completely from scratch,” says Tonje.

The transition was bigger than the distance between the departments. In geology, she had the academic foundation. In the new role, the terminology, equipment and work processes were unfamiliar. It became an exercise in being a beginner again.

Little by little, she learned from the people around her. The experience also showed her the value of rotations. You can try a new direction without needing to know in advance whether it is the right fit.

“Maybe you discover that it’s really exciting. Maybe you find out that you want to go back to where you came from. The opportunity to try different things was honestly one of the reasons I applied for the graduate programme,” she explains.

The phone call she would rather not make

In the new role, Tonje was involved in planning a well. That meant working with suppliers who had specialist knowledge about the parts and equipment that would be used. Tonje was part of the planning, but she realised she did not understand well enough how all the equipment worked.

So, she had to do something she would rather have avoided at the time: pick up the phone to people she didn’t know and say, “I don’t understand this”.

She worried that her questions would expose that she didn’t know what she was talking about. But the reaction was completely different.

“Everyone I called was just happy that I was curious and interested in what they worked on. They had the detailed knowledge and were keen to explain, and no one reacted negatively to a graduate asking questions,” Tonje smiles.

“After a while, I became comfortable calling and asking instead of trying to Google my way to everything. I went straight to the source. That gave much better results,” she says.

It can be difficult to show others that you aren’t good at something right away. For Tonje, this was a pattern she recognised from far beyond working life. Earlier, she preferred to stick to activities she already knew she was good at. Then she decided to challenge that habit. It started with running:

What is the social environment like?

When you are new to working life, you meet a lot at once: new tasks, new colleagues and expectations you don’t yet know. For both Daniel and Tonje, it has been important to have other graduates around them who are in the same situation.

Daniel describes the gatherings as an opportunity to meet people from different countries, cities and disciplines.

For Tonje, the graduate community has led to several close friendships. At one of the first gatherings, she discovered that several of the others shared her interest in fantasy and science fiction books.

It did not take long before they had set up a digital book club. Every month, they met on Teams to discuss the book they had read.

The book club isn’t part of the official graduate programme, but it says something about what it’s like to be a graduate at Equinor: you don’t start alone. After all, a sense of community isn’t created only at organised gatherings, but between people who are going through many of the same things at the same time.

What do you actually learn about yourself?

Professional development is easy to point to. You learn new systems, work processes and methods. Personal development is harder to measure. Tonje notices it, among other things, when the phone rings.

Earlier, she could dread calling someone she didn’t know. Now she makes contact when she needs an answer. It also takes more than it used to for an unfamiliar task to stress her.

“I think I have become a bit more robust,” she smiles.

She hasn’t become confident because she knows the answer to every question. She has become more confident that she can figure things out.

Daniel describes a similar change. When he started, he felt he had to prove that he deserved his place. Now he sees learning as something the team does together.

The graduate programme gives you tasks that challenge you, people to learn from and the opportunity to try new directions.

Daniel continues to find his place in a new country and a new professional environment. Tonje continues to ask questions she might previously have kept to herself.

Neither of them have all the answers. But both have become better at finding them.