I’m a QA professional with 9 years experience. Worked the video games industry for four years and worked in gambling for five years.
Looking at what route to take in my career. I would say I enjoy the techincal aspect of QA, exploratory testing, also been learning automation as well.
During my current team, I also intergrated with the devs and help implement and change small features within the product I test. Learning some of the things they do like code reviews, code changes, learning javascript and typescript.
Sometimes I also do some mentoring for junior qa members and find that interesting as well. Doing presentations on how to use a tool or showing them how to write a bug report. Sending emails for releasing testing, communicating and speaking with third party teams.
Overall I feel I would slightly lean more towards the technical route.
From my experience, push forward on both fronts. But if you have to choose, spend some time going deep on the technical. I have focused on the managerial. But I find in this market the demand is mostly for technical testers (because devlopers tend to become managers who then dictate what testers to hire) who have the right acronyms in their resumes intending them to be automation engineers with a side hustle in management. Which is making this market a bit of an uphill climb for me.
So get deep in the weeds on the technical for a couple years. Get into the AI aspect of it. Get competency in a couple languages - java, python, c#, etc. get involved in the CI/CD and observability.
Cool I’ve been learning how to use playwright and javascript the last year. I know some Git and Jenkins for continuous integration. I enjoy using chatgpt for ideas for testing and automating test scripts
Keep building the technical side and on being a lead. There is more job opportunities in that route then being a manager. Can also be a few less headaches.
I believe that if in 9 years you haven’t become already a manager, or desired to be one, you might not like it, or it might not fit you.
My experiences with managers: they do not test, they do all the useless or boring stuff besides it, like presentations, budgets, people, resourcing, interviews, setting up a process, reporting, collecting reports, taking the heat and pressure from higher managers or C levels. Sometimes a manager of testers knows very little about testing, as they are required to have a different skillset as mentioned above.
Maybe a lead tester could be interesting if you ever find such a position.
What a tester’s career looks like is not directly linked to his skills or a lot of the times even his choices. You are a person living your own life with different challenges. Your environment matters, the pay, the opportunities, the network of people, the social aspect that you enjoy, the work amount and challenges, the growth that you might have in a place, the respect of others, the change you make in the world through the product you’re testing, the workplace(remote, wfh, hybrid), the contract type, looking forward to a pension, etc…
I’d recommend to make it about more than one thing, as everything else affects your impression/decision of where you want to be in your career and life now and later.