Door Not Mouth

Periodically I get asked for advice on getting a job in software testing with no experience as a tester. It happened again yesterday.

As a hiring manager I hired many testers, some with and some without testing on their CV. What's most important to me is the way people do their work, how they think and talk about their work, and how they deal with other people around their work.

But I'm probably not the hiring manager you're approaching right now, so bear in mind that the suggestions I'm making below are generic, and mine, and should be taken only to the extent you think they fit you and your situation.

CV, Application Form, Cover Letter

Lead with the skills you have and the value you provided by using them. Make the skills that you think are transferrable to testing most prominent on the list.

Think very carefully before leading with a list of responsibilities such as "attended daily Scrum, reviewed proposals, edited the website". This says almost nothing that a job title won't already cover and suggests you don't think about the value you could deliver.

Find things that you have done that you think are analagous to testing (e.g. proof-reading, reviewing, investigating customer support problems) and say why you were good at them and why the skills transfer to testing.

Explain how your specific background can help you be an asset as a tester. For example, you've worked in the area you're applying for, you have been on the business side and can talk to project stakeholders in a way they'll understand, or you're an experienced user of this kind of software and know how other users will engage with it.

I am probably in a minority but I really like a cover letter. In particular I like it as a direct line from the candidate to the hiring manager. Make a cover letter that explains the generic stuff, but include a sentence or two near the top that talks about the role you are applying for. Why are you a good for this company, this team, this context?

Lacking Technical Skills and/or Background

"Not technical enough" is a very weak piece of feedback when you've been turned down for a role. I'd guess it often stands in for "you don't have programming experience." Now, you don't need to be able to program to be able to test but my strong bias is that if you choose not to learn a little programming you are ruling out a huge set of tools that could help you to test.

I said "a little programming" and I mean it. You can get an extremely long way with very rudimentary skills. Find some courses and work through them, and be ready to explain what you've done and what you've learned.

If you know that you need certain tech experience, perhaps because you are looking to work in a specialised domain, seek out experience there. Maybe there's an open source project you can test on. Being able to point at bug reports you filed, PRs you made, or documentation that you reviewed and updated, will be a positive.

Consider doing some work for one of the crowd-sourced testing companies to give you testing experience, exposure to some of the tooling that testers use, and interaction with other testers.

Find something "technical" that you have learned and explain how you were able to learn it, use it, teach others to use it, add value to the company by exploiting it, and so on. Perhaps you've used SQL in a marketing role and built a dashboard for the team to see hourly updates on the responses to a new social media campaign. OK, it's not Selenium but it is technical and gives you chance to explain how you overcame problems, taught yourself something, collaborated with the IT department or whatever.

Know Why You Want This

Have convincing answers to questions like these

Why do you want to move into testing?
What is testing, for you?
What makes you a good tester?
What have you done to learn about testing?
How do you think you can contribute to the company/team/role you're applying for?
How will you'll deal with a situation where everyone on the project has more experience of technology X than you?
What did you do in your current role to get relevant experience?

Demonstrate Your Skills

What skills do you think a tester should have? Can you demonstrate those skills in your CV, in your phone interviews, in any technical exercises you are given?

Perhaps you haven't been a tester yet, but you can take every opportunity to show that you are ready to be one.

Make your CV concise, comprehensive, and clear.
Ask reasonable clarifying questions to establish context, and then by provide well-structured answers with the important stuff flagged.
Explain how you will approach a task and why, and the risks and benefits of that.
Show that you have researched the company and role you're applying for.
When the interviewers ask questions that seem pointed, deal with them professionally.

Network

I find it tough to advise this one because I don't enjoy networking and I don't think I'm very good at it. However, I do know that making contacts with other testers, and hiring managers, can help you to get a job.

Try attending meetups regularly and talking to others about the fact that you are looking for work. Maybe show that you have something about you by asking questions after a presentation, questions that show you were listening and can think of angles that weren't covered.

Find testing conversations on social media and contribute where you feel comfortable to do so.

Smaller communities such as Slack groups for particular topics, or geographical areas, or types of role, might be an easier first step. They'll often have jobs channels that give you an idea who is hiring, and who the hiring managers are.

This is unlikely to be an overnight win tactic, but turning up in the same places as testers and test managers on a regular basis can make people aware of you and refer you when asked for recommendations.

Summary

Promote yourself. Find the things you've done that the company you want to join will value. Emphasise them. Don't apologise or make excuses for what you haven't done. Don't bullshit.

You want to get your foot in the door, not put it in your mouth.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/6226206588

P.S. The Association for Software Testing's Career Day webinar is worth a look and I saw that Nicola Lindgren has just published a book, Starting Your Software Testing Career, which covers some of the ground above and much more.

Comments

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll

Test Now

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "When is the best time to test?" Twenty posts in , I hope you're not expecting an answer without nuance? You are? Well, I'll do my best. For me, the best time to test is when there

Hiccupps

Search This Blog