This article is an extract from the book, What Did You Even Do? By Jake Bennett
I really mean this: That’s up to you. Software testing could be your forever career, if you wanted it to be. There are many routes, for instance, directly inside testing which you could take:
- Senior Test Engineer: Everything we’ve already spoken about, just more. Get better, more experienced, learn more approaches and apply them, testing the software.
- Test Team Lead: Use all that experience and knowledge to plan testing, guide other testers, and impact the way testing is conducted and how the product is built.
- Test Management: Also manage the people on your team, taking responsibility for their day to day tasks and/or career progression.
- Automation Engineer/ Developer in test: Learn how to code, and start writing “automated tests” and the frameworks which support them.
- Automation Architect: Take responsibility for the designs of the systems that run the automated tests.
- Security Specialist (Penetration Tester): Identify potential security vulnerabilities.
- Performance Specialist: (Performance/Load/Stress Tester): Specialise in identifying whether a system is capable of taking the loads expected in the real world.
Those are just a few. I’m sure I’ve missed plenty, and those are just the roles which directly follow on inside the testing world. The truth is, the skills and experience you gain from software testing, combined with any you might make the time to learn yourself, mean it’s not crazy for you to actually set your sights on any of the following jumps, if they interest you, and follow their career progression tracks instead:
- Developer: Learn to code, and make the product instead.
- Project manager: Schedule/plan/coordinate the team around a project, to make sure things are delivered to schedule/budget/requirements.
- UX: “User Experience”: Take responsibility for the look and feel of the product, to ensure a consistent and desirable user experience when using your product.
- Dev Ops: Take responsibility for technical needs that support the development operation. This could be, for example, infrastructure required to quickly deploy new versions of software, etc… rather than the product itself.
- General Management: Become an engineering lead, rather than a “Test Manager”, and be responsible for the whole engineering organisation.
So really, the question is, what interests you? You’re certain to have to take responsibility yourself, by learning extra things along the way, but many of the technical and non-technical skills you pick up in a software testing role will doubtless be helpful to you in chasing whatever takes your fancy. You don’t need to know what that might be right now, of course, but software testing definitely leaves you with options later on, in my opinion.
