There is a significant increase in tech requirements for new job postings.
Automation became almost mandatory skill, and most companies also want performance and security testing which used to be a niche thing not so long ago.
It takes a lot of time and effort to gain experience in all of these skills, and security testing is a vast field on it’s own.
In India particularly in my city or place
SDET
Cloud
Cybersecurity
Data engineering
GenAI
Few things that I think will trend in 2025 are:
Use of Gen AI-Based Tools in Testing
Shift Left Approach
TDD
Automation
Performance & Security Testing
And lastly which is better selenium or playwright
Frankly speaking, I don’t see anything new in QA/testing trends 
yeah, some companies push certain narratives along with some “experts” and experts, but I can’t say that most of these “trends” are actually trends or something new. Of course, there is AI everywhere and some general things that are popular (or happening) in the IT/tech industry, like automation (or unstable markets). There are some talks about different stuff, such as “the end of the manual testing era” or quality engineering, or the idea that companies don’t need QA engineers and testers - but in my opinion, these are just talks, not trends. I would say that the main trend is talking about QA transformations and new trends 
but there actually isn’t much new stuff in QA. Even reading people’s answers here, I can see that many believe we have the same “trends” that existed 10 or more years ago
ooo weird!
For 2025, the focus should probably be more SAST & A11Y.
A lot of people are focusing way way way more on SAST also because the Testing Trophy is becoming more known/popular.
A11Y is already a trend and keeps being a trend here due to the new European law.
(Speaking for Belgium)
Agreed.
We’re just parroting whatever big tech companies try to push onto us.
Where is the critique from the testing community on the usefulness of all these AI tools?
The “WHY” of these tools has not been answered satisfactorily, imo. It costs an eye watering amount of money and for what? Will it really make the lives of many people better?
It saddens me that I see plenty of well known testers jump on the hype train and even use active fearmongering like “If you don’t get your knowledge (about AI) up to date you will be without a job in the near future! Adapt or get left behind!”
The testing community hasn’t innovated in a long time, we’re just following along.
I wish we could be more honest and critical about our contributions. What have we achieved?
I partly agree with those tester’s opinions regarding learning AI. Still, it’s like that with any hiped/popular/mainstream tech, if you want to have more opportunities for your career and have higher chances for success you may follow tendencies. Still, obviously, tons of companies don’t have AI in their products and use it for developing and testing and they are successful and offer compensation higher than the market does.
With DeepSeek in the news, has the AI bubble now burst? 
20 years ago everyone was talking about how test automation was going to replace testers, and if you didn’t get on the train you were going to be left behind. Today it is AI. Maybe it will go faster for AI to mature and be really useful in production, maybe not. Either way, just like test automation, it will be a useful tool in our work in the future, and learning about it will be helpful to anyone in our craft.
Now in the beginning I think we are seeing a little bit of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People overestimate how much they know, and don’t see the complexity, unknowns and problems that come with integrating AI into production.
I have definitely found use cases for AI in my day-to-day, and it will change how we work in the future, just like test automation did, but in the end it is just another tool for us to use, and how we work will change to some degree because of it.
At the recent MoT Manchester attendees were asked what topics they wanted to hear about. “Not AI” was answer that received a lot of support. People feel tired of it atm. I feel it needs time to balance and mature.
This are some uncommon things that are trending in testing apart from tools:
One of the thing that is trending in testing right now is looking for new opportunities. People are getting laid off, people are not happy at their work-place. Almost more than half of the people in testing on linkedin have put “Open to work” on their profile, and those who haven’t put are also looking for new opportunity.
The trend of having feeling of job insecurity is rising, AI tool is fueling that, people are doubting their skills.
Putting clickbait thumbnails on YouTube to scare people with the power of AI tools is also trending in testing.
Having high expectations in coding from testers is also trending. Along with that expectations of knowledge of so many tools from tester during recruitment process is also trending.
I agree.
I’m tired of hearing a lot about AI stuff on TW, IN, conferences, etcetera.
Last year, for example, I attended a conference where all the talks were very repetitive on the topics around AI. It seemed like they were giving the same talk but with a different name. Many of them were nothing new to us.
Manual testing still most things to do, automation still discussing which one better between cypress and playwright. AI for testing (create test cases, test plans, code, etc) still debate whether this one good for help or can be dangerous relate to security. Testing AI still debateable