What training should I pursue to advance my QA career?

Hey folks!

Here is my question to the MoT community: What training would you recommend for advancing this career?

Background:

I’m 1.5 years into working in QA for a company I love. Today the work is 100% manual testing of software and high-level HW testing, so the bulk of the work is software. My background is technical but that’s from on the job experience. Because I test HW I always have to be around it, but I want to advance into a line of work that is easily mobile (i.e. The laptop is the office) for personal reasons; the employer is 100% supportive of this, and they are growing fast so there is room for this to happen.

Related / relevant:
In recent performance feedback my manager urged me: pursue additional training to advance your skillset, with a focus on software testing. My company does have automation engineers and a project in my domain needs someone to create a test plan and could be tested via automation, so I could run with that project 100%.

Tried already:
I’ve completed a few courses on LinkedIn Learning in QA and have some programming experience with Python, unit testing, and Robot Framework, but what I am lacking / looking for is the “tie it all together” training, like a project-based “learn through a series of escalating projects” training. There is some budget as well, up to $4000 or so, from the employer for this, so even if this training was an ongoing instructor-led program that is possible.

What do you recommend?
Please, and thank you!

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Hello @infohiking from experience I can say there is no one recipe to advance in your carrer. It depends a lot on what you want and on what projects the company has. I know people that are experts in Web automation but have never done embedded testing and are on a junior level in terms of security testing.

But … I do want to try and help you a bit with my answer.

You can try the following

  • There are several 30 Days challenges on MOT - these would help you focus your learning to a desired area and also not long or hard to take up a full days work

  • If you are video oriented check out https://testautomationu.applitools.com/ - you have mobile, web, api and it is all free.

  • As for the desire to have an automation project Portfolio there is at the moment a whole movement in MOT regarding this topic. Check all post with Automation Curriculum - automation curriculum Search Results | MoT

Hope it helps you a bit.

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I would recommend the BBST foundations course.

I wrote a blog post about my experience here: https://nicolalindgren.com/2014/05/27/bbst-foundations-is-it-for-me/

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I think a great challenge for you are the Rapid Software Testing courses, particularely
RST Applied and RST Explored.
You can find the courses schedule here.
If you are not familiar with the RST methodology, this talk by Michael Bolton is a good introduction.

And after the course, you get an invite to the RST allumini Slack channel. Great discussions happen there - people from all around the world and with different backgrounds, contexts, and problems.

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Thanks for sharing, @restertest.

@infohiking And there are also the following Club posts to deep digger into the Automation in Testing Curriculum.

Good luck exploring your options for training. If you get the chance, feel free to post here again in the future to let us know how things progress.

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Thank you @deament ! I’ll check it out. Much appreciated, thank you.

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I gather you have been an avid QA for at least 2 years, and that learning to code might be your big hurdle. TAU Learning Paths | Applitools is free, but I would find out what programming language you need to learn, get the company to pay for a course in it somehow and nail that baby. And then move from there.

Mainly always remember that this is a small journey step Graham , it’s not an overnight thing, and all the things you learned as a manual testing person will still apply. However formal training in correct software architectures and software process is going to help you become a better Automator, don’t try to self-teach yourself to code.

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