I’m mid fifties and I love testing but I remain cautious about recommending it as a career for others as most of the jobs I see advertised are often missing the key elements that I love. Despite your young age I suspect you do have a lot of experience, skills and knowledge you can draw on to help you be a good tester.
Not all testing nor testers are equal and those differences definitely contribute to job stability.
What sort of tester do you want to be?
For example a lot of companies test primarily in a confirmation or verification model. A lot of this testing leans towards activities that favour machine strengths like scripted testing. Here it makes sense to hone automation skills in hybrid developer/tester role. If that was the path then I would spend time asking why not go full on developer instead? Others may be able to answer that, I cannot as whilst do a lot of automation its never been the fun part and I left a developer role with good reason. AI tools can likely help you fast track into this area but carries a risk you do not fully understand the risks associated with this. Manual testers with their test cases here, I’d pretty much rather do anything else than that.
For others testing can fit a more highly technical product risk investigator type role, this is the part I enjoy, think CSI discovering. and experimenting with risks that could present problems or opportunities for the team to react on. I’m sticking with a real world example of this testing to learn and discover model, Space X’s starship launches where even an exploding ship is good testing as they learned something new every time on their products journey to mars.
They have a lot of crossover but are often very different roles and jobs both under the banner of testing and different people will take different elements of fun from these, I strongly prefer the latter.
Someone mentioned ISTQB, for me this would be only relevant if your job market was in a hierarchical culture where managers guide and oversee your work or you go full on into that testing to confirm model, The ministry of testing content seems much better and broad enough to learn both those testing models well. RST course also seems a decent fasttrack into testing approach and for many even late starters can put you ahead of a lot of experienced testers who have only worked in a narrow field.
These days I’d say you really must be technical either way, that does not mean strong coding but definitely strong technically and tool loving.
I personally do not recommend test cases as starting point, when I was onboarding new testers I think we spent about two hours total on this just for awareness and then moved on to better approaches, others will think differently about their value though.
Getting started, you are in one of the best places for learning with ministry of testing. Go through the content, new starters, foundations, books to read, people to follow and meetups. You will need to get your foot in the door somewhere and that needs contacts particularly with limited direct experience.
Its stability though is not often based on logic or reason, cost, myths and magical tools impact perception and at least for the over fifties when one job goes I’ve seen brilliant testers still take quite a while to get there next role.
(at least frontend development that is).
Reason being is that it’s currently one of the most recognised certifications, so it can open doors, especially in regulated industries, but my opinion is that if you test the way ISTQB teaches, you’re not gonna have a good time. Others’ experiences and opinions may differ.
I’ve been doing alot of these already, at first without even knowing it.