What are your career goals?

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

Hello

I’m really interested in finding out what other people’s career goals are at the moment.

I am currently making my plan for the next 3, 6, and 12 months and I am looking for a little inspiration as well.

Can be soft skills that aren’t directly related to testing.

My three for the next 6 months are:

• Improve the way I provide feedback on tickets/bugs.
• Learn and apply Page Object Model practises for automation.
• Create a basic web app using Java ( for personal use) to learn/practise skills that aren’t directly related to testing software.

I look forward to reading any responses.

Faith

[sarahbyng]

Goals I have ticket off in the 2 years at my current job:

• Learn to write, run, edit automation - swift Xcode UI.
• Learn API testing using postman/ Charles.
• Be an acting scrum master, performing scrum ceremonies, managing workflow.
• Get Mobile app testing certification, Agile certification.

Things I want to do this year:

• Get more practice presenting to people
• Mentor junior staff
• Organise community events for testing
• Learn how to code more.

Sarah

[gerardmccann]

Hi,

Really interesting thread!

Mine for 12m are:

• read at least one tester book (I have ordered James Bach’s Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach)
• attend as many of the Belfast Minstry of Testing meetups as I can
• improve my business knowledge a LOT (I just moved jobs so am learning lots about the new business)
• bring more technical testing into the business as we have very little right now (automated functional testing and API testing are definitely required)
• persuade the business to hire more testers as otherwise I as the sole tester will just be swamped with manual functional testing and won’t have time for to any automation
• act as mentor to any tester new hires who are at a more junior level
• upskill on accessibility testing as the business has a gap there and I have very little knowledge of it right now

Think that’ll do me and I’ll be lucky if I get a majority of it done

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

@gerardmccann

upskill on accessibility testing

Ditto, actually! This is something I’m doing at work though which is why I left it off my original list above. I’m looking forward to the accessibility power hour…

[milos (Miloš)]

For this year I want to improve my coding and test automation skills.
Plan for the next year is to learn more about AppSec and DevOps, maybe transition to some junior DevOps position if all goes well.

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

Ooo, devops. I wish you the best of luck

[tester007 (Miles)]

After three and a half years in my first job as a tester, I’m moving to a new company. I’ll be going from working with one other tester, to a test team of 50 plus people! Plus I’m moving from the public to the private sector. So it’ll be a massive change for me.

Short to medium term goals:

• Gain as much knowledge as possible about the business I’ll be working for.
• Improve C#, PowerShell and SQL skills.
• Learn how to use Docker.
• Learn more about Azure.
• Get stuck into as much exploratory testing as possible.

Long term goals:

• Gain experience of mentoring and managing junior testers.
• Gain experience of recruiting new testers.
• Become test team lead.

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

@tester007 Sounds good… what do you use C# for? Selenium?

Good luck with your new role

[chris_dabnor (christian dabnor)]

@tester007 About 10 months ago, I became Head of my QA department. In an uncharacteristically bold move for me, as they were looking at hiring one, and they’d asked me to interview new QA candidates, I asked if it could be me. I’ve been lucky in that the one junior tester I recruited hasn’t needed much mentoring, and he’s become a much loved and respected member of the company, which is something that makes me immensely proud (hopefully you’ll get to experience that). Heading up a team can be both satisfying and stressful, but it’s been more the former than the latter for me. I wish you all the luck in attaining that mentoring and recruiting role.

[gerardmccann]

Quick update…

The James Bach et al book I mentionewd above is really, REALLY helpful. It’s exactly the kind of book I like: can read it in bite size chunks, it challenges you to think, it is relevant, it is practical.

I think I’m going to commit to reading another … probably something ‘agiley’.

Hope everyone else is making progress. I think this is the key point as the next 12m will happen fast, so making progress on the career goals day-to-day or week-to-week is so important.

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

Awesome, I’ll check it out

Have you read “Don’t Make Me Think”? I think it may be a popular book, but it’s great. It’s about web usability

[gerardmccann]

Never read that one, but will add it to my shortlist, thanks! I once knew a guy who had … he loved saying about everything we presented to him (he was my manager), how can we make that simpler as “it’s making me think”, i.e. we need to improve what we produced to make it more like the book.

[froberts (Faith Roberts)]

Did anyone manage to complete any of their goals?

[milos (Miloš)]

Short answer - no.
I’ve certainly made some progress, but then shifted my attention somewhere else.

[gerardmccann]

I completed my PERSONAL goal of reading the James Bach book and endeavouring to get my company to embrace some of its ideas so we can improve software testing and off the back of that, our quality. However, in terms of my BUSINESS goals, no such joy! It’s not easy to encourage change in a business unless it wants to change, it’s a bit of a chicken vs egg situation. Per the advice in Lisa Crispin’s book ‘Agile Testing’ (the reading of which is another PERSONAL goal I achieved), sometimes you have to let them (i.e. the organization) feel the pain. I think that will be a goal for this year: to point out quality issues and costs to try to get the idea to be embraced that there is a solution to this: upping the amount of and quality of the software testing we perform as opposed to trying to get stuff to production as quickly as possible.