I joined a thread on another forum earlier today and it got me thinking a bit, anyway thought I’d share what I often see even if on the face of it it seems against the current market view. Feel free to share your own thoughts on this or perhaps some people may be looking for help in making the transition.
The path from automation to testing can seem a bit odd but in many cases there is some logic behind it.
Often when people start in testing many companies focus on basic verification activities, these they want to automate so careers initially often go from a basic verification role to an automation role, market demand for this path is high.
What can happen over time is the individual gains deeper insight into testing and starts to see many more opportunities beyond the verification activities and perhaps at this point they transition into a testing role if they prefer the discovery element of testing over the verification element. Many in automation roles will also choose to stay and further specialize in automation, others will choose to move to development but moving from an automation role to a testing role is a very valid career path.
Similarly often companies themselves evolve the same way, initially focusing value on verification but over time seeing more value in discovery focused testing.
Often the market still sees testers primarily as verification focused particularly where they have self created high regression risk, so that makes sense that they will pay higher for coding and automation skills in those markets.
Here I am talking about testers who can code but choose to go beyond the verification focus and into the broader field of testing as a whole.
I see it as a much smaller market but looking for companies that see that higher value in discovery focused testing could offer interesting career moves with similar or higher pay.
One of the challenges within the market though is that sometimes those discovery focused testers are viewed the same as the old verification focused testers and can be grouped in the same basic testing basket when there value add are often worlds apart.
I hope the path will become more of an option as companies grow their testing understanding, I see signs of it in some companies but the older view still prevails.
The local market in my country (Bosnia) is relatively small, but, I have noticed a trend that people who know automation do get paid a lot more compared to testers who can’t code, sometimes the salary for an automation QA is up to 50% higher than manual, especially for juniors.