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

🙋 Questions
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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:

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  • 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
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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.

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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:

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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:

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

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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.

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

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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:

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