Another great question asked in the career planning AMA was:
How do you know when it is time to move on?
any tips on preparing to test in an industry you have never worked in before?
Which Bruce responded to with
By the time you’re asking the question, you’ve probably decided. It took me blinkin ages to move because I had good friends and a lot of opportunities for learning at my old place, but no opportunities for meaningful progression of my career.
I just moved industries, and a lot of testing skills are transferable but I do wish in hindsight that I had done a better reccie of the products and competitors. The first month would have been a lot easier if I had just sat down for a week and read the documentation on the website, all the promo material for the product, and how the company fares compared to other people who offer similar services.
Before starting I did ask my new manager for a list of topics he thought were most important to learn about for people who don’t know anything about the product. He sent some articles about design patterns we use a lot, as well as things to do with our tech stack and the product in general
I would definitely recommend switching industry every now and then though, it is invigorating!
Have you thought about the signs that it’s time to move on? What did you do to prepare yourself for testing in another industry when that time came?
When you get sick if you think about having to go back to work on Monday.
I felt like that while I was working at a gas station, it was boring, with long hours, low pay and you would be dealing with money and customers directly, I hated it!
That is why I deciced to move into IT, that was around 7-8 years ago and I’m quite happy now.
If I was asked what my biggest personal fault is, I would say “misplaced loyalty”. In the context of this discussion, that would be an excess of loyalty to an organisation. I was a UK civil servant for 30 years, the last 20 with one of the utility regulators. I started in that organisation when it was less than two months old and the experiences I had in the first five years were life-changing. But once I moved into a testing role, I became increasingly sidelined, because the organisation saw this as a menial task, highly separated from policy roles and data analysis (even though that analysis relied on my work being robust). I kept trying for sideways moves, but no-one could understand why I should want to apply for roles which did not represent an increase in direct pay or status. And feedback from the interview boards revealed that they had no idea what I actually did in the organisation and why that gave me a good insight into the work of their own teams.
The final straw was when I applied for a high-profile role working with European legislation and I was turned down - after doing what i still think of as the best interview of my life - because those recruiting for the role had effectively pre-judged which candidate they wanted from outside the organisation and had never thought of me as a possible candidate, My performance at interview did nothing to shake them out of their complacency; such was my reward for loyalty.
It took me another 18 months to engineer an exit on terms that were acceptable to me; when I announced my departure, people said “You can’t leave - you’re like part of the furniture!” To which I replied “Trouble with being a part of the furniture is that people tend to sit on you.”