Career Progression In Software Testing: How Did You Get To Where You Are Now?

For me, this thread is more about the role of testing as a step in career progression, rather than “how I got where I am today as a tester”, because I sense that the argument within the profession is that there is little or no career progression beyond stepping up from tester to Test Manager. If anyone has a better example, please share!

I can demonstrate how testing can prevent career progression, though. For 20 years, I worked for the UK water economic regulator, Ofwat. For 15 of those years, I was test lead on our main data collection tool, which was sent out to water companies. They populated it with data, sent it back to us (no Internet in those days and strict limits on e-mail mailbox sizes) and then we used an uploader to scrape data off into our main database. My testing was intended to demonstrate to Very Senior People that this system was more foolproof than pen and paper and that data collected was uploaded correctly, ended up in the right places in the database, and that calculated values were correct. Every analyst in the organisation used that data and relied on its integrity; and as a result of their analysis, decisions would be taken over the scale of water bills for every consumer in England and Wales. So no pressure there at all.

In organisational terms, though, this was a dead-end. So at various times during those 15 years, I tried to engineer a sideways move. (For the first five years of my Ofwat career, I’d worked in the Director General’s outer office, at various times directly either to him or to his professional PA; at other times, in the press office. If, in the years 1990-95, you ever saw a quote in a UK national newspaper attributed to “an Ofwat spokesman”, that was me, as I wasn’t a press officer and so shouldn’t have stuff attributed to me by name; but we were a small organisation, we all multi-tasked, and as long as I was given a line to take, I was a pretty safe pair of hands because I’d spent ten years working in social security and had had to sometimes explain difficult stuff to people who were sometimes definitely not ready to hear it.

The trouble was that every time I tried to move sideways, I was kicked back because no-one really understood where my experience and knowledge was coming from. Very few of my colleagues even understood what I did, even though they used the products of my work every day. Things came to a head when I applied for a quite high-profile role in EU policy liaison. I did detailed research on the role, the lines of policy and communication, and a proposed workplan for Day One, Week One and Month One. But the guys running the recruitment had already decided who they wanted to bring in from Brussels given half a chance, so I didn’t get the job despite doing the interview of my life. In the feedback session, they said “We never knew you had any sort of ambition at all to do this job.” (They’d had cloth ears for all the hints I’d been dropping for the previous 18 months, but still.)

So if there’d been any career progression in testing in some organisations, I wouldn’t be here today. I’d probably have ended up being headhunted into the Department for Exiting the EU three years ago. Instead, I stuck with the testing role for another two years, by which time I was pretty jaded with testing the same thing for so long. I left the Civil Service with the intention of making my name as a writer and photographer; that lasted about two years before the money ran out, after which I had to go into testing again. But the testing I went back into was very different to the testing role I’d had before. The rest is history - though in terms of career progression, that’s more been down to the way the different organisations I’ve worked for have treated testers (or staff generally) rather than any sort of planned or ordered career progression as such.

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