Life as a Tester: Career progression in tech

DW: In terms of continuing to learn as an Automation Tester, what does it look like? What would you recommend to other Spartans?

JS: I learned a huge amount in my first few months – you have to, to understand what’s going on! I use AWS a lot in my day-to-day and it’s commonly used in the industry, so upskilling in that certification suite is useful.

DW: At Sparta, we have many more people applying to our pure dev roles than SDET. I think automation testing’s a great career – I’m biased because it was my career – but have you got any thoughts on how we change people’s perception on what a testing role looks like?

JS: One of the things I realised very quickly is that I may not be in a dev role, but I am a developer! I’m developing software every day - it’s software that tests other software. If you’re aiming for an engineering role because you want to be a dev, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t go into test automation.

DW: At some point in my career, I decided I didn’t want the words ‘quality’ or ‘test’ in my job title, because I thought that in some people’s eyes it painted me as a less credible engineer. Frankly, I felt just as capable as any other ‘engineer’, I just had a real specialism in that I really cared about quality. Do you think the words ‘quality’ and ‘test’ have a bad reputation? We bunch engineers together whether they’re doing node or Java or C#, so why are testers separated from the rest of ‘developers’ as a specialism?

JS: That’s a good point. I consider myself an engineer, and I don’t see my specialism in test automation as a bad thing.

DW: So now you’re a year in, where do you think you’re heading? What are your ambitions? Where do you see yourself in a few years’ time?

JS: I think a lot of people’s answer to this question is that they want to be in a management role, which isn’t necessarily where I want to be. The enjoyment of the job for me is in the engineering side of it and I want to be doing that as much as I can. If I can gain more knowledge on the wider testing industry and become be someone that could be dropped into any project because I have the skills, that’s what I’m aiming for.

 

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