This topic reminded me, I was in sort of similar situation. It was what got me to blog about it recently. In one company I worked for (my first tester role), we were doing manual testing without much of a process in place. One of the senior QA blokes left and the second senior QA (he was my TL briefly) left too, soon afterwards so I didn’t have anyone left to learn from. We would just test the product (e-learning courses) and we would just write down our findings in tickets so stuff would get fixed - we didn’t have any test management tool in place, so there were no test cases or anything.
That whole situation got me thinking that testing is a lame career so I started learning about web development. I eventually left that company after a while. It was in my second QA role that I got to see what proper testing really looks like and I feel in love with it.
From today’s point of view, maybe I should have left my first role sooner, but, if I have done so, maybe I would not have learned a lot about development and coding in general - today in my current tester role , the developers literally call me “one of their own”, and ask me why am I not a developer if I can code and don’t need help setting up a local environments. The company was into TDD and they didn’t have testers at all for over 10 years. But when I came aboard, along with two other testers, they welcomed us with open arms after seeing what more structure in testing processes can do for a project. That and other types of automated testing that they didn’t use before.
What I’m trying to say is, that regret is illogical and mostly useless. Our past experiences are what makes up our character in present, it can all work out for the best in the end, as cliché as it sounds! 