Is the quality and testing market showing signs of recovery?

Is the quality and testing market showing signs of recovery?

  • Yes, lots of positive change
  • Yes, some positive change
  • It feels the same
  • It feels worse
0 voters

:star: Bonus points for sharing any commentary and specific signs of improvement

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In my humble opinion, an increasing number of companies are prioritizing rapid deployment over thorough testing, often adopting a ā€œdeploy fast, fix fastā€ mindset. Many organizations are relying too heavily on automation.

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I see There is high demand for continuous testing and faster feedback loops.
Also Organizations are investing in test automation tools, performance engineering, and shift-left testing to meet these requirements.

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I donā€™t know what the criteria is so I assume itā€™s about offers/demand on the job market.

Where I live there are available about 10 positions/year .
Consultancy companies are doing worse due to budget constraints of companies hiring consultants.

The entire IT market is going bad, according to the national agency for employment (the unemployment increased by 7% compared to dec 2023): ā€˜This increase particularly affects jobseekers who have been registered for seven months or longer, those over the age of 30, and highly qualified jobseekers (graduates of higher education). In terms of professions, the largest increases were seen in road transport occupations, accounting, culinary production, IT, and banking. ā€¦ The total number of available positions at the end of the monthā€¦representing a year-on-year decline of 15.2%ā€™

Some colleagues from IT/Finance saying the causes are generally: ā€˜Most of the companies outsourcing their positions to cheap locations.ā€™, ā€˜Massive outsourcing in financeā€¦ and AIā€™

I see some people replied to the question: do companies still require testing and quality management, and to which degree these can be done by specialized testers or engineers?

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When was the market bad? Havenā€™t seen any changes in demand here in The Netherlands

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Agreed, they are mostly confused with the actual purpose of testing and the real focus here. Hence they often fail to get the best value from testing and end up abandoning it all together. Developing an application is a cyclical process itā€™s a combination of coding and testing at each cycle as the application develops. Lack of care for establishing testing function reflects in lack of care towards customer.

Caveats to my vote:

I havenā€™t really been looking for jobs, but I do see job postings.

I am assuming weā€™re looking at the job market for testing, rather than any other signals.

There are some improvements in the job openings but the problem is that lots of testers are coming from different sources like colleges, institution certifications, udemy, etc. which has caused a huge demand-supply gap.

Even though there are some more openings compared to last year, the number of people seeking new opportunities is so high that the opportunity quantity appears very small.

It will take some time to stabilize the market but the current scenario is really tough for those who are seeking job opportunities as well for those also who are doing testing jobs.

We havenā€™t questioned the timeline about the asked comparison.
So here goes my wonder - compared to which period? Last month, summer last year, January 2024, post Covid year, Covid period.

Yep. You could be right here. And adding to that, there are some English speaking companies where they are open to an import of cheaper workforce from third countries.

Another thing to consider besides the number of jobs and applicants for a position is the amount of time someone takes to switch jobs after being laid off or quitting the company. I kept seeing on LinkedIn testers looking for positions in Europe with English as language for 6-12 months without luck.

To those replying, Iā€™m curious, have you been actively looking, applying and interviewing for a job in several companies in the past year or so?

Recovering since when?
Begin of 2025? Since the proclamation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 and following loss of test managers which protect and grow their testers?
Since the demand for automation pushes against exploratory experts? (Sorry, I donā€™t have a date for that)

Would you please add context to the question? There are trends of different duration ongoing.

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I come from China and work in Shanghai, where is of the most IT companies in China. I have ever got a lot of offers in Shanghai with my rich testing experience until 2024. A lot of famous IT companies left from China by political reasons during/after COVID-19 which extremely shrank the IT market. With those bad political reasons on-going, I believe our market will be worse in the following decade.

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It seems that the tech/IT market is showing some signs of recovery but some companies are still struggling and there are some layoffs here and there. I would say there are lots of negative tendencies that make the market unstable so I believe any fluctuations in the quality and testing market are the results of changes in the IT industry, I donā€™t think that there are some changes that are specific in QA leading by some changes specifically regarding quality

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What examples of this spring to mind in the past 12 months or so?

In the past 12 months, have you noticed it is better or worse?

Worse in Germany. Mid 2024 I saw a drop in demand for testers.
I received way less direct requests from recruiters. Had I until that at least one request a week, if not multiple, in my inbox, it became around one per month.
Iā€™m not sure about about the numbers of job offers. At least I perceived a lowering of requirements, companies looking for more juniors, not anymore willing to pay a senior.

So far I donā€™t see improvement. One point is that VW published plans in fall to close factories which hit the heavily car-related German economy heavy. If not immediately in sales number, then at least in expectation.
But overall Mid 2024 the (growth of the) economy went down and the market became more tough.
The crash of the governing coalition and the upcoming elections in February create/enforce uncertainty too. No one can say how the economic policies for the next years will be.

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I use Welcome to the Jungle (formally known as Otta) to search for jobs and it gives me a bit of an indication on the health of the QA job market right now.

When I first started using it a few years ago, every day would be full of new jobs. These days, Iā€™m lucky to see more than a handful every week on there.

LinkedIn seems to be a bit healthier although I do see the same jobs being reposted over and over again as well jobs from recruitment companies that never seem to reply.

So overall, Iā€™d say that there hasnā€™t been much recovery in the UK at least

Besides that, Iā€™ve noticed that many companies arenā€™t taking into account quality assurance and quality control on their products; and Iā€™ve noticed that there are fewer companies hiring testers: Time to time I see less job offers related to our area.

1 single person doing everything? Thatā€™s insane!

Letā€™s be honest, they donā€™t care about qualityā€¦