What Skills Are Needed for a Novice Tester?

Before making the decision to become a tester, you should get familiar with the skills and competencies you should acquire first of all.

When you read this article, you will be able to build a clear plan of your studying and understand what skills you should develop to become a successful QA engineer.

Top 6 steps you should start with

Finding required information

We live in a world where information technologies develop very rapidly.

Therefore, we can find any information we don’t know on the Internet.

A QA engineer should be able to process new and unknown information himself/herself.

Not many people will wish to work with someone who constantly asks about something or clarifies something.

We talk here not about certain testing tasks but their interpretation.

For example, you need to execute and update a checklist.

You don’t know the meaning of a checklist but you shouldn’t run to your colleagues to ask about this, you need to learn to work with information.

In other words, simply google and find an answer to your question.

Thinking

You may ask: are there people who can’t think?

But we mean here a frequent practice to ask an applicant who applied for a job of a tester to solve some task during a job interview.

This is done to make an employer see to what extent a potential employee can think correctly, not simply check how they learned a theory.

The most popular questions are:

• Why did a bug appear?
• Why did I not see it before?
• What should I do to fix this error?
• Where can the error appear too?
• Etc.

Curiosity

When a client asks you to do a certain task, you shouldn’t start doing it instantly.

You should learn the task, divide it into small parts and afterward, start implementing it.

This should be done to make your work meet the client’s expectations completely.

Writing a CV

You should do this properly since a well-written CV is one of the reasons you will get a job.

A good level of English

Today most projects testers work with are English-speaking.

Therefore, the higher your level of English is, the more chances you have to find a job.

Passing a course on software testing

This step is more a recommendation than an obligatory step.

If you pass the “Basics of testing” course , you will have fewer problems in understanding what testers do and this will make your employment more possible.

You should also constantly develop additional skills.

Ability to test everything: web applications, mobile software, and providing mobile testing services will be a big bonus for you as a specialist.

Conclusion

You can see that not much is needed to start working as a tester.