Hello folks, I just found this forum and have been searching around and gleaning what info I can over the past day or so. Figured I would share my current journey and see what advice I may unearth. Thanks for reading and any thoughts.
I am 9+ year veteran of the Software QA world. All 9 years of my career have been spent at the same fortune 500 company.
Through Nov. 2022 to May of 2023 the company, like many, let go of a large chunk of its IT staff. After ducking and dodging the cuts my time finally came last May. Prior to my 9 years in IT, I was a sales person for this company for 15 years. Needless to say, a change of scenery should be a healthy move regardless.
I decided to take some time over summer, hit pause and figure out my route for my next steps. To rewind a bit, I left sales for a few reasons, but chief among them, was the constant rat race and levels of stress. It was high volume and fast paced. Burn out was inevitable for most who do this type of work. I knew i needed change. I had always loved working with computers since I was a kid , but had no formal training and really knew nothing about software development.
I reached out to a manager I knew within our company and he gave me a shot as a QA. I enjoyed the challenge and soon was making some great headway on my new path. I loved testing the software I used to work on as a sales rep. It gave me great satisfaction. I worked my way up to more high profile projects within the company and soon was seen as a senior member/ leader of our QA group.
As a note, we didnt have QA leads, or even QA managers. We had team managers, that typically came from the BA or Dev background. On a whole, our IT dept didnt really have a large QA presence. Of the 700 people that made up the dept, the highest headcount for QA got to about 50 worldwide. In our region/continent it was more like 28. Most of our QA department was manual testing only with little to know interaction with automation . We had a team or two that stood up automation frameworks for their products, but being a big company, it might as well have been a whole separate entity behind closed doors to most of the rest of us.
I pushed for our teams to use automation but mostly got pushback from above stating that manual was more important and to just stick with our usual testing strategy. We would get some token opportunities when things “slowed down” to work on automation projects, but I would barely call it enough to say we were automation engineers or anything.
I pushed for the chance over the last few years to learn/work on automation and did get some time and experience (mostly on my own time) automating and writing some scripts using puppeteer library/Typescript and with a group of other QAs learning, we were able to automate some e2e user workflows. We managed them for a while debugging the tests and updating various test scripts. Our management said, "cool, now get back to manual, we will talk about this when deadlines cool down. " We never got back to it.
So here I am, trying to find my next job on this journey, and I am slowly realizing that automation is the broken link in my skillset. What i have done isnt nearly enough, its like dipping the pinky toe in.
What I am wondering is, are there more attractive ways to level up my skills, more value added paths, or is automation so essential that it really is the necessity in the toolbox?
If it is, what is a logical next step for an unemployed QA looking for work, yet also trying to level up skillset meaningfully in the mean time.
