How did you make career switch from manual QA tester to automation QA engineer without CS degree?
Hello there,
I would like to know if anyone had a career switch from manual QA to automation QA with similar background to mine. I have a long experience in manual testing and about a few years with automation + manual QA role (Front End only) and less than a year of Front End Dev experience. My educational background is MA and a few CS certificates from a community college. I am a woman and have two kids.
My previous female coworkers who have only manual QA background and are raising kids do not even try to train themselves for automation QA roles because it is just too hard, studying and taking care of the family. After laid off, they merely become housewives.
I got laid off a few month ago and it is very hard for me to find a new job. Because I do not want to give up like them, I am learning new skills on my own. I would like to hear your experience/advice in this sort of situation. Thank you so much in advance!!!
Hi Akiko! I've worked with and interviewed people who have made the transition from manual to QA automation and it's definitely possible.
In San Francisco you're in a great geographic location to work at a smaller, startup company. Often internet startups begin without any QA at all, and then later decide to hire QA once they're making enough money that they start to care about the cost of problems and regressions. If you can do a mix of manual QA and QA automation you might get the job over candidates who can only do one or only the other. The manual QA skills which are in demand at technology startups are usually not QA against a detailed specification, but rather self-directed QA with an incomplete or informal specification and an intuition for how to find issues.
On the automation side, mobile is as important as desktop now, and because it's much newer there are also fewer people with experience, so I would encourage you to learn as much as you can on mobile phone QA automation to give yourself an advantage.