What do you do if youāve been a manual tester for some time and are unsure where to take your career?
What options does that person have? Where might they take their career?
(I appreciate some folks donāt like the term āmanual testerā. For the benefit of this thread try not to get stuck into that, instead share advice for those who identify themselves as manual testers.)
I understand and I just want to say, there is nothing wrong with being a manual qa engineer. Which leads to your original question:
People always see test automation, performance testing, test coordinator or manager as a āstep upā. But I believe itās not the case, you can āstep upā as a tester also. In fact, I personally prefer to do manual tests. I started out as a tester and got more and more technical, learned the automation craft and performance to realize, itās not what I want to do (at least full-time).
I really prefer to test an application manual, but also ātechnical manualā. Iām coming up with out of the box cases that nobody can think of on a functional & non-functional level which is so much more fun then writing the same code over and over.
If you really want to change, feel free to do so but donāt be afraid to stay doing what you do.
Otherwise we would only have ājuniorsā in that trade 
and someone has got to teach them right? Maybe thatās you?
I like to call it a āTechnical Exploratory Testerā
Honestly, itās going to depend a lot on the individual and their company - and whether said company has places where the individual would like to go.
Larger companies can sometimes stratify, where theyād have Manual Tester 1, Manual Tester 2, etc. Some might even go as far as Senior Manual Tester which can be roughly speaking the same rank as a team lead. (Of course, they have the same for Automated Tester - which, sorry, brings up images of robots happily testing away). The actual title varies, of course, but if the place supports a āSeniorā having about the same rank as a team lead, then great. Weāre not all cut out for team lead responsibilities, mentoring, or management.
In a smaller place itās possible to take on related responsibilities like product analyst or tech writing (Iāve lost count of how many of my writeups found my way into user guides - and Iāve written a few user guides myself because thereās nobody else to do it). These may not necessarily be in the role description, but they do help keep a person interested and fresh, and they can add perspective to the primary role of exploring and testing software.
My experience may be a bit unusual, but Iāve found the name/description of my role usually bears little resemblance to what I actually do. This may be because I have a tendency to step in and get involved whenever I see a need or a situation where I can help - but it happens.
Since thereās no clearly defined professional path for us testing folks, the sky is the limit. We can make our career path wherever we want, sometimes without changing the job title.
Having worked with many QAās in the past, there are some that do excel and perform above and beyond with manual and exploratory testing. I would never push them to automation unless they wanted that.
In a world where developers are encouraged to take more ownership, I do get the QAās to advise the developers on what standard testing they can do with regards to Unit and Integration tests within the code base - to then allow the QA to look at the complex and fringe cases. - This does in turn empower them to take a greater role.
Agile / Scrum āmasterā or facilitator is also something QAās like to get involved with since they do have a greater overall āvisionā of the products as a whole, and tend to ask the questions that matter most in the team being able to achieve success and understanding of the effect of change.
If desired, Non-functional testing is also a great area to get into and can also be seen as an entry to automation if required. But expanding on Performance and Accessibility along with Ui/UX is a great way to broaden scope.
I would throw the question to the QA - āWhat more do you think you can improve or expand on within your roleā - Nobody like to āstagnateā.
In terms of growing we developed a framework at a previous company that I found useful in terms of Growing. First thing is to unpack seniority. When you are junior this means that you cannot do the job on your own yet. You need some supervision of some sort. So your priority should be to learn all you need to learn to do the job. When you have done that (we called the stage medior), you can do almost every aspect of your job without supervision. From a company point of view this is where we want most people because you typically produce more value than you cost.
So for the Senior stage the question that needs answered is how you can produce more value than just doing your job really well. And now we need to introduce your personal skillset and motivations since they determine what your options are. But some outlets that can be explored. One option is to change role, but for this framework I will discuss it from the point of within the role you already have.
A few archetypes that we developed:
All of these have a clear value that you bring to the company in addition to doing the job well. Therefore easy to see that they should provide higher compensation.
Honestly as a Test Manager, I can say hand on heart that automation wouldnāt be a success if it wasnāt for great manual testers. In most organisations Iāve worked in, managers outside engineering seem to assume that its the pinnacle of every testers career to move to automation.
Iāve learnt a lot managing teams, usually by correcting previous mistakes. In the team I manage now, we make sure we have a balance of manual testers and automated testers, they are vital to eachother and career progression and opportunities is massively important to.
So not an exhaustive list, but this is where Iāve seen manual testers progress. Most importantly these are at the testers choice, not mine:
Automation - every tester needs to at least understand automation to the point they can review whats been automated and understand the coverage. But that doesnāt mean they want to do automation. If the tester understands the code and it excites them we can with mentorship get them into automation. Imagine the value of manual testers who has the deepest analytical skills who wants to go into automation, how much other automators can learn.
Management - Automators are usually specialists and from my experience not many want to go into management. I recently promoted a manual tester to a management position because literally their organisation skills, all round understanding of the test process and most importantly supportive personality was perfect for Line Management
New Projects - The more projects you get your hands on, the better you become as a tester and the more you discover about yourself. So once you feel that you current skills are at a comfortable level, look horizontally at opportunities to work on other projects or other areas of large projects. Projects have peaks and troughs, so we move people around if they want it to experience other projects.
Senior or specialist responsibilities - There are individuals who demonstrate real talents for specific areas but donāt want Line Management. It could be processes, presentation, domain expertise, efficient test design, exploratory testing etc. I embrace those specialisms and if testers want to harness those skills and take more responsibility in those areas, then why not?
Just to finish, we have a wonderful culture in the team where manual and automation testers respect eachothers skill sets and collaborate brilliantly. As an example, we did a presentation to a large portion of the company outside engineering to explain the skills involved in manual testing and the challenges involved to dispell the myths and assumptions. It was presented by Automation and Manual Test Engineers. Very powerful moment that.
Iād suggest to that person that they take some time to pair up with people who do other things. Years ago, I had a tester on my team, letās call him Rob, who was a top-notch exploratory tester but told me (I was the manager at the time) he never wanted to do any test automation. Fine, I said. He was great at what he did. We had another tester who focused on test automation, letās call her Pooja . Over time, Rob got really curious about Poojaās work and started pairing with her a bit. Then he came to me rather sheepishly, and said he would indeed like to work some on test automation.
Try things out. If you donāt see anything you want to try in your current job, maybe join an open source project and see if you can pair with someone there. Or just reach out to someone here whose work interests you. Shadow them or pair with them or just talk and learn.
Sine you donāt elaborate on what you do for your manual testing I would like to first expand on that part.
Assuming that you have only tested the User Interface experience, I suggest you look to expand your manual testing into the areas of API testing. Get to know how to use tools such as Postman, SoupUI, and CURL.
Another area to expend into is boosting your SQL skills. Being able to understand the table relationships and a base understanding of SQL coding in order to read and understand stored procedures is always helpful. Expand that into being able to write basic SQL in order to seed DBs with data you need to test is a useful ability.
As for other things, you can explore automation, performance testing, or security testing, Security can be a useful addition to your manual testing skill set. I recommend that you try these other paths and see if you have an interest or aptitude for any of it. Explore what interests you.