Test Automation Engineers how do you build a portofolio?

This is a question for Test Automation Engineers and SDETs: how do you guys build a portofolio? What do you add to it?

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I don’t have a portfolio for test automation. If I will make one, then I will follow the tips in the following blog post of Angie Jones:

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Definitely agree.
Nothing wrong with going public with your skills, this shortcuts a lot of the interview process if someone can see visually that you have got prior “art” published on github, or other sites. It’s not for everyone though, not all of us as public people. A lot of super clever people have anonomized github accounts, where they publish awesome tools under a pen name, which you will never learn about. Which brings me to one other point, you may need 2 github accounts.

As Angie points out in her post, be varied, take training modules in a variety of automation platforms and languages. My experience is that valuable test automation people are jack-of-all-trades who rarely let themselves get sucked in too deep in just one watering hole.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that publishing yourself is not for everyone, but it’s a good way to get a start in any ecosystem and get used to the idea that “selling yourself” is the new normal, and the web is the way we do it. Github and many many others like it is the modern equivalent of photocopying your CV and posting it through letterboxes, master the technique, and set your own comfort level of “salesperson fakery” and shine to get the chance on the best jobs, where you can shine.

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I think my portfolio is sort of cobbled together between posts I have made on here as they hopefully show some intelligence and time spent in the test community :slight_smile:, courses undertaken on MoT, MeetUps (probably not directly part of a portfolio, but relevant IMHO, YMMV) and MoT events at which I always ensure I contribute and ask questions and do as much networking as best I can, various posts I have made on LinkedIn and any coding/tech tests I have done for job applications which I always keep a copy of.

I guess that shows I have no portfolio as such, but I do have lots of material and it’s visible ‘out there’, i.e. on t’internet so potential companies can check me out and hopefully like what they see :slight_smile:

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Writing about technical challenges and how you’ve approached them is another option to “get yourself out there”.

Writing loads of test code is one thing. But solving problems and being able to articulate your thoughts and process is another.

For what its worth, I work on private code bases and this approach struck me as a great idea.

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I am trying to publish my prototype code pieces on github lately.

Once I start adding “internal” knowledge to the code, I copy and “fork” into the work repo. But I can then write a quick blog about the working prototype. It forces me to communicate the idea more fluently once I publish. But, mostly this lets me publish some of my working test skeletons into a portfolio which I might one day have to write in a hurry.

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