Getting a Career in Software Testing

I was recently approached by Alfred (name changed to protect his identity as he removed the comment from my blog) who asked if I have any advice on what steps to take in order to train for and start a career in Software Testing. Well, Alfred, thank you for asking! You have already taken important steps; reading blogs and asking questions.

Your concern about ISTQB is a valid one. They do claim they are the industry standard, but that’s only based on the amount of people they have certified, instead of what actually matters. Don’t get fooled by their sales pitch, just focus on learning. Especially a beginner tester might seriously harm his learning when taking their certification. Essentially, they will teach a bad way to use their vocabulary, advocate there are best practices and require that a question can be answered correctly with only one choice.

If you are interested to learn software testing at home, you could do some of the following (and add your own ideas of course):

1)      Start writing a blog about your learning (please let me also know about it so I can read and comment)

2)      Read online material (as the Internet is full of itself, I recommend to stay with only a few sources in the beginning, such as BBST)

3)      Read and comment blogs on software testing (to get you started, here are some http://www.developsense.com/blog/, http://visible-quality.blogspot.com/, http://www.satisfice.com/blog/ and http://scott-barber.blogspot.com/)

4)      Join Twitter and start following testers (you can take a look for example on my list https://twitter.com/#!/jarilaakso/following as a starting point)

5)      Test software, write a report and either leave it on your blog publicly for everyone to comment or ask other testers, like me, to comment via e-mail or whatever you prefer
(Addition after posting already: forgot completely that you could search for conference videos)

If you want to work in software testing, you want to know companies, possibly join recruitment sites etc. Twitter works as a great channel to get to know about new job openings, to find out who is recruiting and for example to get yourself known. But no matter how good Twitter is, you will need to work a lot to be successful. It’s true there are a lot of people who don’t thrive for excellence and they do pretty well in their life. It’s up to you to decide which path you will take.

You mentioned you are based in England. There is a huge software testing market (go ahead for example to Monster.com and verify my claim) and you will have a lot of competition. Think how you want to separate from the crowd and use it in your advantage. For example, if I’d be recruiting at the moment, I would love to receive for example test reports and/or Youtube videos instead of the typical CV’s I tend to see. But hey, that’s just me, I can’t say what you should do, besides that follow your heart in your decisions.

I noticed you mentioned the “test is dead” part in your comment. Don’t take it literally. There is a continuously growing demand for good testing in the world. Think of it as an opportunity for people who want to do a good job, or even yet, an excellent job. The more there is software around us, there more there is request for testing.

If you have open questions, please leave a comment below or for example e-mail me. I will be glad to help everyone I can.

(This post was written after a suggestion in Twitter from "Mike Talks" https://twitter.com/#!/TestSheepNZ/status/199099553587273729)