Bloggers Club / Share Your Blog Post - October 2023

Hello folks!

Long time no see.

Trying a Bloggers club topic - Share your post hybrid for October.

So feel free to take the suggested topic as inspiration for a post. Or share what you’ve written in October.

This month I’d love to hear about

How do you approach continuous learning?

With the topic, take it in whatever direction you like. I always see these topics as “guidelines” rather than rules. A bit like the pirate code.

How to get involved

  • Write a blog on the above topic or share whatever you wrote in October.
  • It can be as long or as short as you want it to be
  • Share a link to the blog on this thread :eyes:
  • Receive lots of support, encouragement, and love from the community :heart:

Moderators Edit: There’s also a dedicated chat channel for sharing your blog posts. Visit Chat #🤝 Sharing

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I just recently published an article called Negotiating an offer: An unreasonable number of reasonable requests where I do 2 things:

  1. I like this concept of making an unreasonable number of reasonable requests when negotiating. When you apply it to job offers it has a useful effect of help you understand reasonable requests to change a job offer are a good thing.
  2. I listed out over 10 major requests you can make when negotiating a job offer such as Salary and even things like figuring out how many weeks of severance you get in advance. (To read this list you have to sign up).

This was partially inspired by a club post a while back because I started making that list here: Day 13: Share your experience with negotiating salary and benefits or like someone else's post - #10 by ckenst. It was also inspired by my recent work change and seeing others do the same.

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Thanks Chris, these are great.

I’ve never had to deal with Equity in my negotitions, but feel like I’ve got enough to start figuring it out.

Out of curiousity (and opening myself up for a “it depends”), do you generally find your top priorities change much?

For example with me, PTO and the ability to buy more is really important, thanks to school holidays.

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I’ve written some guides on how to start session-based testing quickly and how to expand on the idea to fit various scenarios. If you’re not familiar with sessions this is a way to get going fast and have fun. Worth a try, I think.

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Just posted my One week update on looking for a new job in QA Automation: Adam Fahey on LinkedIn: #ministryoftesting

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Thanks for reading it Aaron.

I haven’t moved jobs very frequently and so my top priorities do tend to change a bit more dramatically. I think this makes sense. If I changed jobs every year I wouldn’t expect much variation but over a long period of time I’d expect them to change a lot more.

For example: Early on in my career it was more about salary. At another point it was more about equity %. Then I really wanted professional development and conference costs covered. Now I want more flexibility in job schedule, PTO, etc.

Another important note about being in tech (at least in the US): our salaries & overall compensation tend to increase regularly. Remote work is really common too. So some things generally just kind of become accepted which is nice.

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Interesting that you blog on LinkedIn. Actually its more like a long form social media post, which also makes sense that you are posting about your job search.

Do you think you’ll still write on LinkedIn when its not job search related?

Some thoughts on how I approach learning in general. And, my ups and downs with learning continuously.

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My original idea was a once a week mini post on Linkedin. I might change it to a blogger site.

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I wrote a small blog post on taking ownership of what happens after you have become unemployed. If you have the time for a three-minute read take a look: Keeping the rust off the tools (test-insights.blogspot.com)

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I learn alot from books and have just blogged a review of “Black-Box Testing” by Boris Beizer.

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I’ve been looking forward to reading this since you spoke with Simon on “the week in testing”. Throughly enjoyed it too, well done! :partying_face:

Thanks for sharing what is both practical advice, and a difficult subject to speak about.

Thanks Mike

I enjoy your reviews. They do give me “the problem” of adding more books to the reading list. But hey that’s a great problem.

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Thank you. I used to refer to learning as “continuous learning” and did so until I was corrected by Kevin Cahill. I found his reasoning interesting and wrote this about the discussion I had with him. I hope that you find it interesting too. Please let me know what you think: Should we practice continuous learning? – TestAndAnalysis

Thanks Flynn! I am glad you enjoyed it. I think Ill post another blog about interviewing for next week.