Seeking a mentor to help me grow as tester, QA engineer

🙋 Questions
, ,
1

Hi :wave:

My name is Max

I’m looking for mentorship from someone who has QA/Test Lead experience and can help me improve my QA, testing and automation skills.

I’m currently “QA Product Tester”, based in Sydney at a small company. I do not have a strong technical background.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn or twitter

Please see below a “short” summary and some additional details about me :slightly_smiling_face:

6 Likes
2
  • Why look for mentor?
    • genuinely want to help my new employer to improve QA processes
    • grow as a tester / QA engineer in general
    • improve such skills as risk analysis, planning, reporting
    • if possible, help me solve my mental health issues or self-doubts or even confirm that this career is not for me
    • find a good mentor/friend who can relate to my interests, experience
  • Electrical Engineering background (~ 10 y)
  • No CS degree
  • English is my second language, native Russian
  • Switched career to testing in 2018
  • ISTQB certificate
  • RST course
  • Azure Fundamentals AZ-900
  • some small courses completed on TAU, Udemy, Linkedin Learning
  • ~ 2 years part-time tester in small startup, remote, mostly exploratory testing
  • ~ 2 years full-time tester in med-size startup, remote
  • full-time job highlights:
    • working in QA team (5-6 members),
    • 80% “manual”, 20% test automation
    • exploratory testing, testing heuristics
    • test case management,
    • defect management
    • scrum team
    • Azure environment
    • TestComplete for UI automation
    • Azure Pipelines CI/CD
    • Familiar with Playwright, Cypress, Selenium
    • Familiar with Python, Javascript/Typescript
    • lack of experience with formal test planning
    • lack experience with QA and advocating for quality
    • Git, GitHub basics
    • API testing, Docker basics
    • familiar with basics of security, performance, accessibility, usability testing, though not much practice
    • got redundant in 2023
  • other highlights
    • landed new job as tester / QA in October 2023
    • keen to learn about agile testing practices
    • struggle with programming and automation
    • possibly have ADHD, this negatively impacts my productivity, often a lot :frowning:
    • had an episode of depression in 2023 (burn out + ADHD + self-critisism)
    • favourite tools: Playwright, VS Code, ObsidianMD, Raycast
    • Interests: note-taking, recently low-code, no-code, AI in general, indie hackers, new shiny apps
  • hobbies
    • electronic music
    • swimming
    • running
    • podcasting (no-longer doing it, but happy to help/chat)
    • Amazon seller
4 Likes
3

Hi Maksim! Love how detailed and informative your post is. It did pique my interest a lot :slight_smile: and I certainly relate, even to the neurodiversity and mental health struggles.

I won’t offer to be a mentor to you - we seem to be in a pretty similar place in our careers, tbh :slight_smile: But if you’d be interested in having a learning buddy, somebody to bounce your thoughts off of, “co-mentor” each other - I’m game!

Sent you a LI connection request.

3 Likes
4

Hi @baysha
Thank you for reply!
Definitely, would love to connect with someone who can relate to my journey, be it mentor or buddy :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
5

Hi Maksim, great to have you here in MoT and with that - you have a good variety of folks here who can help in being a mentor, buddy or whatever. :slight_smile:

Don’t know if others are still using twitter/x, but more active on Mastodon or on Bluesky (if you need an invite, just message me) - I do have an unofficial list of software testers accounts on Bluesky:

And I can recommend attending the events, like the TestBash Autmun event

or others to connect and exchange. This helped me a lot in the past years to grow :wink:

3 Likes
6

Thank you for your responses.
It looks like I found a learning buddy and a mentor.

2 Likes
7

Hi Maksim

A fellow Sydneysider! A rare breed here on MOT.

I can relate to the mental health and career pivoting issues here. I too recently pivoted into software testing in Sydney.

Happy to chat on LinkedIn if need be.

I’ll send a request via LI.

3 Likes
8

Thank you for your reply, @nicole_chan !
I got your request. Will message you on Linkedin shortly :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

Btw, so far I had 2 sessions with my mentor. It was incredibly helpful.
If you are someone like me, who is thinking about getting external help, do not hesitate! Give it a try.

As I said, for me it was very helpful to be able to discuss with someone my challenges and share my progress.

:slight_smile:

4 Likes
11

Do you mind sharing the mentor details please (or DM)? I’m looking for a mentor too

Thanks

12

Hello

I am hear about your interest in improving your QA, testing, and automation skills. Before we proceed, I will share some of your current technical skills related to QA Testing?

Looking forward to connecting further!

13

Can you reach out to Ajay Balamurugadas or Ravisuriya eswara or Dimpy Adhikari

They are grest people who can help you.

Please talk to them.

1 Like