Top skills every Software Tester (QA Engineer) should know
Speed of career growth 🔗
Junior. Lightspeed.
As we all know the professional growth goes approximately this way: the first year of your dedicated work in one field gives you lots of experience as long as you are not sitting at the same place. This level is called Junior.
Middle. Still going.
For the next couple of years on your career path you feel more comfortable, and you are performing way better than in the first year. How much experience you gained comparing to the first year? General case is that you are still growing pretty fast, learning new things, becoming more comfortable with technologies you use at work. However, it’s not so fast as it used to be in your starting year. This level is called Middle.
Senior. Danger of routine.
As the years are passing you by, and you have approx 5 years of experience you are now called Senior. All the things that you have done within these 5 years are already a routine for you and you feel pretty comfortable at your workplace.
More comfortable - less experience.
At the same time, the more comfortable you are the less professional experience and career growth you get as a specialist. Moreover, the technologies and skills that you learned when you were Junior specialist are most likely not in trend anymore and slowly a specialist becomes unneeded on the job market.
Ever asked yourself: what to learn next? 🔗
This slowly leads us to the problem of ‘Which skills do I need to develop to be always in demand on the job market?’ Another question may worry recent graduates ‘Which skills do I need to develop to get my first job offer?’
One possible way would be to ask your colleagues, friends, friends of friends for advice. However, let’s consider a better analytical way.
Vacancies analysis 🔗
Many companies provide public APIs for accessing some of their public data.
So there was developed a system for fetching vacancies from public API by keyword ‘qa engineer’. Around 400 vacancies have been collected and analysed.
⚠️⚠️⚠️ Disclaimer : this research was made in 2018. Since that time industry and requirements changed a lot. This article is kept here just for the history.
Top of skills by categories:
Top of skills:
Top of programming languages:
Level of English fluency
Conclusion 🔗
To sum up the performed analysis I may conclude that the most important thing the test engineer needs to master is English language because all the state-of-the-art technologies, documentation, guides, forums are in English. Also, most of the colleagues and clients are likely to be English speaking. Without this tool the path of mastering other tools and technologies can be not that fast.
Never stop learning 🔗
Hope that after scrolling through statistics you have some idea about what to learn next. Good luck in your explorations ;)
A day without your mind working is a day wasted.
Who doesn’t go forward stays behind.