How to land your first job working as a Quality Assurance Analyst
Moving into tech, Quality Assurance Analyst
What a company wants when hiring a QA analyst?
After 10 years of experience working as a QA in multiple companies, going through many interviews, and also participating in hiring other QAs for these companies, I have an idea of what a company wants when hiring a QA analyst. You can use this information in your favor when you apply for such a role.
Here are the key interests of a company when hiring for this role:
Wants someone creative to test their application. Probably this company is not investing a lot in test automation and prefers to have a human touch on their testing so they want you to be creative on your test cases and take more of an exploratory testing approach.
Wants someone organized. The organization with your test cases and test reports is key to saving the company time and time is money. During the interview, someone will be paying attention to see if you are an organized person.
Wants someone that will be a bridge of knowledge between the developers and the product owner or business analyst. Developers are usually busy with their code in their minds. As a QA analyst and as a customer advocate your main concern is understanding the features and making sure they are working as expected by trying to break it. This focus is what will bring value to the company because you will find bugs or even features not working as intended by the product owner due to some misunderstandings.
Wants someone to act as an infiltrated customer to bring the customer mindset into the development process as early as possible.
Wants someone that is happy to manually test each feature the team delivers. The company expects you will happily perform in this role for some time and not be bothered shortly after you enter.
Wants someone to test the main features of the application before a release to production.
Wants someone capable of being empathic with the team and at the same time able to point out bugs in their code. This is really important, there is a balance in character for a tester. You want to be empathic with the developers but be able to chase down a bug until it is fixed or prioritized.
Team player, if you find a bug and you believe it needs to be addressed asap do try to convince the team of it but ultimately, if the team decides to not prioritize that, take pride in the finding and accept that it will be addressed later as a team decision (that can even prove wrong in the future, but at least you did your part).
What a company wants when hiring a QA analyst without experience?
The less experience the role requires the more important non-technical skills are, like “soft skills”, organization, capability, and will to be self-taught. The company will open its doors for you to start your career and in return wants you to make it easy for them to train you.
A passionate bug-hunter mindset, someone who likes to break an application and has fun with it, and is proud of the bugs he found.
Someone capable of writing test cases in a clear and organized way.
An organized person capable of storing test cases and test reports in a test management tool or similar.
Someone nice that will get along with the team.
Someone not afraid of chasing bugs with the developer, meaning that sometimes you will be pointing out flaws in their code.
Eager-to-learn person. Both self-learning and learning with others around you are praised.
Someone that already shows some level of knowledge on basic QA topics, like types of testing, test cases, test reporting, and so on…
Start learning the skills and tools
I won’t get into too much detail in this section as it would make this article huge. Instead, I’ll mention what I believe you should focus your learning efforts on.
Backend testing
For a backend testing position, one should have knowledge of some basic concepts and tools.
Postman as a tool to test APIs
Frontend testing
For a frontend testing role, you want to have a strong focus on mastering the browser developer tools and understanding HTML and CSS.
Using Chrome developer tools for web testing
Html and CSS
Mobile native apps testing
If the role is about testing mobile native applications then you should know you’re away with Android and ios systems. Things like installing and uninstalling apps, clearing app data, and accessing and using developer tools of each system. Some notions like retro compatibility with older versions of the application are also useful and the process of releasing an application to the main stores out there (iOS and Android app stores).
Tester roadmap
Here is a good roadmap (what one can learn to be able to perform in this role). Do note that one does not need to learn everything that is in this roadmap. Some of it is focused on Test Automation and other mentions are also not worth a lot of time invested. https://roadmap.sh/qa (made by kamrify).
To help you navigate this roadmap I made some personal notes. Whatever is inside a green rectangle is what you want to focus your learning efforts on. Check the following image:
Building a cv
If you want to apply for your first job as a QA Analyst, in my opinion, you should craft a CV that shows the potential fit you are for a vacancy like that. In other words, anything related to quality or testing mindset that you did in the past should be there, a brief presentation that will hint at “attention to detail” and “organized” traits are also important. Including one or two testing certifications in the cv will also make a difference. Consider having a testing project to show and include the link in your cv. The testing project can contain a target site and the test cases written and properly organized to test one or two features on that website.
Get a recognized and valued certification
This is not mandatory but in my experience, it is usually valued because it shows two things. The person is driven to learn and has already some type of knowledge on testing because they did the course. It can only benefit you to have certification. You don’t need to go crazy, one or two will suffice!
I usually recommend the ISTQB foundation or any other mainly because of the fame it has while still having some good content. I’ve seen countless job ads asking for the ISTQB foundation. Nowadays is not that expensive. You need to pass an exam to have the certification though. For the second course, one certification course with good ratings on udemy will do!
Some recommendations:
https://www.udemy.com/course/specialize-in-software-testing-with-real-examples-agile-jira/ - This one looks pretty good because it is really getting close to the day of a QA in a real company.
https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/istqbr-foundation?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid-search&utm_campaign=upskilling-and-reskilling&utm_term=ssi-emea-xyz-dynamic&utm_content=free-trial&gclid=CjwKCAjwpuajBhBpEiwA_ZtfhcpQZU1lPfSp2HahYawbS9WGEMZuc3IkZsR1bZbdBQtx-a6qy2JftxoCykAQAvD_BwE
Try some freelance testing sites while you wait and use that as experience
If I were to start to land a QA job without experience nowadays my first approach would be to register on multiple freelance testing sites with the only goal of start getting some experience that I would later insert in the CV. Not only you can gain some money with testing on these sites but you can show you are a hands-on person with a lot of will to work in testing and you are already getting some experience.
Here is a list of these sites: https://ddiy.co/freelance-websites/software-testing/
Get 1 on 1 coaching
As a QA Engineer, I mastered the QA analyst part of the role first before moving into automation. Even nowadays a good portion of my job still includes a lot of manual testing. I can help you land the job and move into tech.
I’ve helped several people make the switch to tech and all of them are way happier now. Some became successful QAs and others even moved to development.
Reach out to joaoluisam@gmail.com if you want to have 1 on 1 coaching sessions with me.