Take your testing career to the next level - What changes are needed for advancing in your career?




A few changes will be needed before you start the journey to the next level in your testing career.


Start today

Your career is important as your personal and professional life depend on it.

Take action today.

If you want to see change in your career, start today!



You need to learn things that you don't know yet

Growth happens when you do things that you are not doing currently.
  
If you keep doing what you already know and do, change will most probably not happen or happen very slowly.

Or it may not be the change that you want to see.







Learning new things should become a part of your daily routine

To go from your current level to the next one, you have to learn many new things.

How fast you get to the next level depends on how much time you dedicate to your       learning and how often you do it.

If you try to dedicate a few hours every day to learning, 2 things may happen:

1. get into the habit of continuously learning and looking for new things to learn about

2. your skills and knowledge will start increasing relatively soon


An important question about learning new things is: 

How can I find the time for it when I am already so busy?

The time is there for you every day.

At work, while your testing is blocked because the application has critical issues, you can use the time for learning new things.

When you are waiting for the test environment to be set up, you have time for learning.

When waiting for another tester to review your scripts, you have time for learning.

Read this article for a very detailed discussion of the method.



Taking ownership of your learning is very important

Going to the next career level is easier and faster if you take ownership of your learning.

This means that you are responsible for

1. Selecting what you will learn about

2. Finding resources for your learning

3. Practicing the new skills and knowledge

4. Researching solutions for problems

Expecting that an employer sends you for training at all or to a training that is actually useful is something that you should not depend on.

I am not saying that you should not accept training paid by your employer.

Accept it and learn from it.

But do not make this type of training essential or the main source of training for you.




Ask for help when you don't know what to do next

Learning new things means that you will run into many problems.

Every time you don't know what to do next, ask for help.

You can do this by talking with someone who has more experience, posting questions on forums or searching how other people solved similar problems.



 Getting better happens in time

Going to the next level in your career requires time, patience and perseverance.

This is valid for any new skill that you ever learnt.

Think about the time that you needed for learning a new foreign language, a new sport or new hobby.

Did you learn skiing or swimming in a week?
Did you learn french in a week?

I don't think so.


Learn while working on small personal projects. Blog about your learning

Work on a small project while learning a new skill.

This way, your learning will be disciplined and oriented towards a specific goal: completing the project.

For example, if you are a manual tester who wants to learn test automation, start a project for applying test automation to a public site.

Also, start a blog and write on it about your learning and your challenges.

At the end of the project, the project materials and the blog articles will be the evidence that you need for using the new skill and knowledge on your resume.

When going to an interview, developers and graphical designers have most of times portfolios with samples of work they did in the past.

Writing about your learning and testing experiences on your blog can be your own work portfolio.

Read more about a tester portfolio here.





You should seek challenges

Challenges will show you what you don't know and force you to learn even more.

Challenges will help pushing your knowledge higher and higher.

The challenges can be self-imposed or can be job-related.

Take your testing career to the next level - What is the next level?

Where do you want to go from your present situation? 

What do you want to do in the future?




These are questions that you should ask yourself when advancement in your career becomes important.


Possible next levels for a tester are:


1. Specialize more in what you do

You can do this by exploring in depth the type of testing that you know already.

Let's say that your current job is manual tester.

You do manual testing by 

- creating test plans and test cases

- executing the test cases

- finding bugs and logging them

You can expand your manual testing skills and knowledge by learning


  • exploratory testing: test without creating first test cases; exploratory testing consists in simultaneous learning of the application, designing test scenarios, executing them, finding bugs and logging them
  • lateral thinking: learn to think creatively and out of the box about using and testing a system
  • mind mapping
  • test design techniques


2. Become a cross-functional tester

You can become a cross-functional tester by expanding your knowledge and skills in types of testing like 

- test automation

- performance testing

- usability testing

- accessibility testing

- web testing

- mobile testing

- web service testing

- become more technical


Being able to do different types of testing makes you more versatile, multi-faceted and multi-talented.


You can also expand your knowledge and skills in disciplines related to testing like

- software development life cycle: development and testing processes

- source control systems

- code reviews

- unit testing

- set up and monitor test environments

- log analysis

- scripting


The multiple and diverse skills will allow you to target many types of testing jobs in the future.


3. Change the direction of your testing career by focusing completely on a different testing type

You can decide that you will just do test automation or performance testing in the future, for example.

Being focused on one direction only means that you will have more expertise but also that the number of jobs that you can apply for will be smaller.


4.  Become a test consultant


5.  Become a test lead

Take your testing career to the next level

The next posts are about what to do to take your testing career to the next level.

These things were helpful for me and they may be useful for you as well.

Let's start with a few questions that will each be answered in the next articles.





1.What is the next level  of your career? 

2. What changes are needed for advancing in your career?

3. How should you choose the next career level?

4. How do you go from your present situation to the next level?

5. How do you practice the next level skills?

6. How do you get a job at the next level?

7. How do you measure progress about improving your skills?