A testing career, like any other career, can sometimes turn into a long journey before career satisfaction is obtained. In order to shorten the path to career satisfaction and give testers an edge over their peers, testers need to adopt five gems. These five gems not only help in career growth but also help to give you a strong belief in your capabilities.
The Qualities:
- Capabilities Assessment: Assess your current capabilities at regular intervals. A regular monitoring helps you analyze your capabilities against a growth chart. If your capabilities continuously increase your peers will trust you and senior management will rely more on you for any new testing project challenges. Regularly analyzing your current capabilities will help you to ascertain your future potential capabilities and give you the opportunity to reach your fullest potential.
- Optimization: How do you optimize your skills? Do you have a successful mandate for optimizing your skills? Do you realize the importance and understand the benefits? Optimizing your skills benefits your professional growth and enhances your knowledge stream which helps to increase career satisfaction. The catalytic effect is enormous in assessing your potential. The best way to optimize your skills is to receive honest assessments through your peers, mentors, managers and friends.
- Sustenance: As your career grows it’s important to sustain the positive growth and not take backward steps. Achieving new career heights is simple as compared to sustaining it. Advancing in your career is only possible, if you can sustain the career growth you have already achieved. If you can sustain the growth, then you can strive for your next leap.
- Strategize: Strategize how you are going to lead your career path. You can choose a smooth road without many troubles or a road with lots of potholes. If you want to catch the attention of your peers and managers choose the bumpy path as a way to demonstrate your hidden skills and talent. Your managers will not hesitate in empowering you once you win their trust.
- Neutral: It is important to be open, neutral and transparent in your work; in order to do this practice being unbiased in what you say and do. Your neutrality will be perceived as honest and will continue to strengthen the trust between you and your co-workers.
It is important to not only acquire each of these gems but to sustain the positive career growth achieved along the way. With prolonged growth the success becomes part of your blood. At some point, you will discover that success and career satisfaction will require no extra effort because it will begin to happen on its own.
Article by: Jaideep Khanduja
Currently working in India Regional Office of a large versatile International group as Head Quality Assurance and Project Management, Jaideep has over 20 years experience in IT. Starting his career as a hard core developer, in 1987, he became Head IT of a reputable automobile components manufacturing company. During 10 years of his tenure at this company he transformed a small setup 3 PC company to a fully networked Client Server Architecture setup with over 100 PCs and an ERP in place. After that, in the year 2000, he joined another well known automobile component manufacturing corporation which manufactured auto electrical components, exported to Europe/Asia and to all major OEMs. In his tenure of 5 years in this corporation, he helped the corporation to grow from a 20 PC setup to a fully structured network with a centralized mail server, inhouse ERP on Oracle database and D2K as frontend tool, routers, Intelligent Switches, Firewall, Video Conferencing Room. Everything with 100% uptime and all in place. Jaideep believes that innovation, team management, time management, skills enhancement, learning, knowledge management and mentoring are the best tools to grow.
Jaideep writes regular blogs on Software Project Management and Quality Assurance at:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/