Looking for someone with lots of Test / QA management experience, I’d like to make the move / jump to QA management.
A little about me:
Career started 2009
Worked in Telco, Health tech, finance & consumer products (current) primarily automation engineer in all
These have been perm & contract positions
always worked as a individual contributor & looking for help on the following:
1.) What should I learn?
2.) Someone to speak with to learn what my skills gap for management roles is?
3.) What should I do within my own org to slowly move towards management?
I’m a technical tester and I’m not really looking for a position in management. I love testing too much.
I’m afraid that when I would make a switch, I wouldn’t be able to test anymore and just deal with management stuff. I enjoy breaking down software to much to make this jump.
People skills, People management & change management.
It doesn’t matter in what sector you are, if you don’t have the people behind you, it’s useless whatever you are trying to achieve.
Do you have a coach or something? Some evaluation process?
You could give them a small (big!) hint you are actually trying to get to the management. They will probably give you a lot of information about it!
Before I reply, a caution: Given your experience, you are getting into that dangerous area where you might be expensive as an individual contributor. You also may have a tough time keeping up with tech. I strongly recommend continuing to build on tech skills. From test automation, there are a lot of options such as DevOps, CI/CD, API testing, security, performance. You can do these along with your current role. You can also build skills in domains, e.g., salesforce.
There is no easy answer to your question. This also depends on location and industry. In places like India, there are very large teams, and you need managers. In the US and similar, teams aren’t that large and you may not need managers. In large consulting companies, you may need managers.
Don’t focus on learning. You can look for lead/manager roles in your current org. If you are willing to take the risk, you can look for a lead/manager role in a smaller organization.
Explore talking to your manager and others in your organization. It’s difficult to do this online.
It might be good to start by leading projects, i.e., more in a tech role, supervising the work done by a few others. You can see how this goes and then decide the next step. In my experience, when people want to move to a manager role, they are given such responsibilities and then the organization decides what makes sense.
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