Great careers advice for testers – A Review of The Software Testers Journey by Nicola Lindgren and Vernon Richards

This book offers useful advice to testing professionals on how to build their careers. The advice in the book includes examples from testers on how they progressed in their careers. 

There are different career paths: people, technology and business. When you start your career you should consider which direction you want to go in. Thinking about who you want to help the most will help you. You can also look at who has ‘walked this path before’ and learn from their success. 

The differences between mentors, sponsors and coaches are described and useful advice on how to get the most from a mentoring relationship is given.

Testers need to acquire new skills and can do this by building new habits, and gives an example of how a tester improved their technical skills.

Software testers need to learn how to ‘manage up’. Overlooking the company’s goals is a common mistake when advancing your career. 

Feedback can be helpful or damaging. Testers should learn how to give feedback, and there are useful models on how to do this.

There are several examples of how to build meaningful connections, which helped testers to network their way to success.

People say that most jobs are not advertised. There are several routes through which you can apply for these jobs. You need to do research. The book contains useful advice on how to update your LinkedIn profile and how to use chatGPT.  There are also things to avoid doing when applying for these jobs.

One career option is to  ‘go independent’, if you are considering becoming your own boss there are several questions you should consider.

A tester can also take the skills they learned from being a tester and advance their career by moving to another field. Several former testers give examples of how they used skills they gained as testers to progress in other fields. 

Vernon Richards and Nicola Lindgren have written a book that will be useful to testing professionals. We all change jobs as we build our careers, and this book will help us in our career journeys. 

You can buy The Software Tester’s Journey on Leanpub and Amazon.