Hi all, I’m working on my talk for TestBash 2025 on How to Make Your Work - and Achievements - More Visible.
I have some ideas as to why we’re not doing it (enough), and wanted to get some input from you as well.
Could you share what’s holding / held you back from singing your own praises (more)? Even better if you have tips on how you overcame those challenges, or suggestions on how to create more visibility.
Thanks in advance!
I used to have issues singing my own praises. Being a bit perfectionist I’m very critical of myself. What I do is rarely perfect by my own standards. Probably some imposter syndrome as well. It’s also an issue many women have overall.
We have an annual review process for employees. It requires you to write about how well you met your goals and performed overall. Of course I struggled a lot with this. Then my colleague gave me the push I needed. He told me that he just writes about how amazing his work is without shame. The word amazing is key and don’t hold back. I did it and there was no push-back. My manager was telling me he saw it the same way.
So to sum it up: (Too) high standards/perfectionism, imposter syndrome and being socialized as a woman can hold you back. It can help to get feedback for a more realistic view of your work. Singing your own praises can be easier if you treat it like a creative writing exercise/role-play as a person who is very convinced of themselves. (I had some “good” examples in the dev team 
)
For me, the major issue is my experience, as I have just few years of experience so I don’t have very much exposure on many topics and most of them I have learned on my own.
For say CI/CD pipeline, jenkins, docker ,etc. - so in my previous organization as well as in my current organization, everything was setup by cloud team and all we had to do is just run the few commands to build and deploy new releases. So there is not much to explore on floor, whatever I have to learn i have to do that on my own.
That’s just one example there are many things which I’m still learning and experimenting with them.
May be with time i will be familiar with these kinds of topics and would share my work more confidently in public.
I think a major issue is that many of us were raised to be modest and not to brag. And this habit then amplifies itself and leads to not feeling comfortable about sharing your achievements.
What I observe in my team (and in myself) is that many testers are career changers and they need time and experience until they feel comfortable about making their work visible. What helped me a lot here is that I started mentoring and realized that I actually do have experience to share. Since then I’ve been better at acknowledging what I have achieved.
Another aspect that comes to my mind in my case is that all my friends are crazy talented and successful and I typically feel very average next to them (not their fault at all, that’s just in my head). What helps me here is to have friends or colleagues with whom I talk about my work in general/neutral terms and they are able to see my achievements in that and that helps me starting to see them as well. Slowly, I’m getting better at it 
Does that make sense? Let me know if you need any details or clarification!
There is no place for it and people who matter, mostly management, don’t care.
They want to see progress on the project and don’t care much for what testing did well. Its like development are the bricks and testing is the mortars. Its obvious that we are needed, but we are not taking much into account as long as no big problems occurs.
I think that it is basically an culture issue and testing being a highly social craft. Developers can show the features they created (with our help). We “just” have reports, plans and notes. Only a few people care for that.
And culture isn’t changed easily.
For a long time I saw any success or achievements as part of the job I was paid for. It wasn’t until I understood the value of evidence at review time and that you needed to show ‘extra’ value to get pay rises that I found a system that worked for me.
I called it a success record. Essentially weekly, or sometimes daily if it was really important or good. I captured my achievements, successes or any positive comments on a document filtered by month. That way I could use it at my monthly one to ones and collectively at the bi-annual reviews.
It really helped me showcase my value and extra work and the most valuable ones were with evidence of impact.
Curse of knowledge - I think the things I support are obvious (because they’re easy for me) so why would I shout about them? Of course I do cool testing; I’m a tester… it’s obvious!
Burning out others. Sometimes I hold back on singing my praises because I don’t want to bombard others with loads of noise and self promotion from me.
What held me back:
What pushed me forward:
I think in the end, I’ve realized that I write for people like me, who stand in the back in the room, who struggle being brave enough to speak up. I don’t write for the masses. I write for them. If I can be brave and voice my discoveries, maybe it will help someone else gather the courage to do the same.
Its definitely something I’m very passionate about - celebrating success and using it to market the our team to the rest of the organisation. So trying to give people the recognition outside of QA is difficult
We have a monthly all hands and have the option to give “Shout outs” to people for great work. However, I have a problem with that, its not sustainable. So you give person 1 a shout out…that will then influence who you shout out next, because you don’t just have individuals to motivate and manage, you have a team. Next all hands comes around and you’ll think…I better not keep doing shout outs for person 1, I need to do person 2 etc
So I made the decision that when my team have done great work or innovated, I’ll shout out the team. I’ll only shout out individuals outside the team because that.
So from a marketing perspective, I’m showing them we’re team. We celebrate our success as a collective and we recognise individuals who made a difference to us.
We also have sprint demo sessions that are usually dedicated with sharing with the wider organisation what features are coming in the products. I’ve always encouraged the team to be a part of those demos and even demo how they tested features that they were proud of their approach. Its an ideal opportunity to show the organisation, what we do. We can use our team meeting as a safe space to get the confidence in demoing their work and then move it to the bigger audience.
But not everyone is comfortable being put out front to celebrate their own success, so its my job to champion them in the right forums.
If I were still a full time employee on a team, I would definitely be using CountrPT, the app makes it really easy to track your own achievements and contributions. My problem was always that I suck at record keeping, so an app to make that easier would have helped me, wish it were invented sooner!
I used to be hesitant in announcing any certifications or details of courses I have completed as a lot of people openly say (not to me) that completing a course of having a certification in something is meaningless. However, I now always announce that I completed or course or gained a certification. If I have spent many hours of my own time learning something new then I am sure make sure people know about it.
As I am presently learning coding and automation I will fairly soon start uploading projects to github. I have a slight fear that people will rip them to shreds. However even if they do as long as the feedback is constructive then thats a win for me as I will take that feedback on board.
Work achievements is a bit more complicated, mainly because I feel am a small cog in a bigger wheel (which is very much the case). I also get the feeling that if did start saying things most people would think “so what, we all played our part on that project, and you were doing what you are paid to do”
Never heard of this app before, I will check it.
I can totally relate to this! I wouldn’t be surprised if I were my own most regular blog visitor
What about your own achievements / successes? 
Well, I see my achievements and successes reflected back at me in the growth of others. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate recognition for my efforts and do get it here and there, but I certainly don’t seek it. I’m not here to impress my bosses, I’m here to see people grow and teams improve. When I see that happen, key milestones achieved with a smile - that genuinely is the only recognition I need.
It may say a lot about me but these days if I am given “public” recognition and praise, I appreciate it, but I’m not comfortable with it 
I am fortunate enough to not have to make my achievements more visible: my team is y own personal hype machine when it comes to that
The problem is that I don’t believe I deserve all the praise they give. That’s because of two reasons:
I have posts that I reference so many times. At least I know where to find what I need now!
One of my main skills is helping others bring their best selves to whatever we are doing. I really struggle to talk about my contributions, as often I share my courage & confidence with the team, and that results in a world of wonderful things. This is fine when my manager recognises the value I bring, but not when they cannot see the value I bring.
I feel super cringy when I start talking about the influence I have had on other people, as I don’t see it that way. I just see it as I show the team the way to a growth mindset. I think in writing this post, I realised what is holding me back. I don’t know how to articulate the value I bring to people who do not have a similar shared understanding of a people-first approach.
I also think being a woman in testing / leadership also impacts me, but again not sure how to articulate it. I would probably need to take a look back at the authority gap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJcYAqNfgtA
Happy to chat anytime on subjects like this, it’s such an important topic and I can’t wait to hear your talk.
I think a big part of it is British culture to downplay things so openly talking about myself in a positive light doesn’t come naturally (I appreciate this might not be isolated to Britain). I think modesty is something that’s quite engrained in me.
I focus heavily on team work as well, so firstly I don’t want to take credit for other people’s work but also the line can be a bit blurred sometimes to understand or be able to demonstrate what it is I’ve actually done. But oftentimes small actions are important even though it’s easy to dismiss them as inconsequential. It’s the reason and impact of them that’s important.
In previous places I’ve worked QA wasn’t seen as being as important as other members of the team which caused me to put less importance on my work, myself.
Self doubt and my own concerns about my level of experience. I question if things that I do are actually achievements for my role. So I guess imposter syndrome kicks in a bit here.
Things that have helped me:
Learning to accept that there is an element of “playing the game” or ticking boxes in these kinds of things and part of that is having to tell people and demonstrate what you’re doing if you want that promotion/pay rise.
Otherwise, having experience in customer service and sales in the past has helped me with my communication and persuasion skills.
My work has OKR’s and targets which helps to frame at least part of the conversation when it comes to performance reviews. This can also help me to realise the right things to work toward and can mean I have more reason to shout about achievements if they’re ones I know are a good challenge upfront.
There were two main reasons why I hesitated to make my achievements more visible.
First, I often compared myself to others who seemed more capable, which made me feel uncomfortable praising myself.
To overcome this, I started focusing on comparing myself to who I was yesterday. If I had made any progress, I acknowledged it.
Second, I struggled to clearly demonstrate the causal relationship between my work and its outcomes.
I’m still working on overcoming this challenge.
I’m trying to design measurable indicators that can help demonstrate the causal relationship between my work and its results.
Hope this helps and is in line with what you were hoping for!