How to kick-start your career as a QA tester with no experience

Information Technology has bewitched everyone and grown to new heights in the last few years. It has become the largest growing industry with global reach and amazing pay for the employees. There’s no one who doesn’t know about this field, and almost everyone thinks of choosing IT as a career path at least once. And one of the best and promising career fields within Information Technology is QA Testing (Quality analysis testing). With astounding level of growth and global reach, this is an ever-emerging field of IT. The advancement opportunities are astonishing. And thus, it is an excellent choice as a career path. 

Now, if you have an IT background and some experience, bagging a job as a Quality analysis tester or Software tester is fairly easy, given that you have the proper knowledge. Also, as software or Quality Analysis tester, you will be expected to understand requirement documents, make and execute test cases, report, and re-analysis of bugs, attending review meetings, and other activities. Apart from this, you can also move into various specialization fields like automation testing, performance testing, business analysts, etc. But with no experience, it becomes somewhat difficult. But this is such a promising field that it’s never impossible. So, if you are such an individual who is trying to get into this field with no experience, don’t worry! We have got you covered.

QA testing training : 

Firstly, you need to have proper knowledge about QA testing and what exactly will be the job role. For this, there are a lot of online QA courses and certifications available. You need to gain proper knowledge about QA testing through these courses. Taking online courses is your best bet nowadays as it’s highly valued.  

Here are some of the most valued certifications for QA testing :

• International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) – one of the most successful and widely known certifying schemes in the world.
• Rapid Software Testing (RST) – created to teach the “skill of testing any software, any time, under any condition”, meant mostly for experienced testers.

Now, there are a few skills required, both technical and non-technical, when it comes to QA Testing. Developing these skills and building your resume will give you better chances of becoming a QA tester. 

Let’s first talk about technical skills and how you can gain some professional credit with no experience. 

Technical skills: If you have no prior experience, your best bet is online training. Undergoing online QA training and bagging certifications will help you to build a stronger resume and, thus, secure a proper job in this field. With QA being such an evolving and promising field, there are thousands of online training options available and some credible certifications. 

Database/SQL: This is the root of your skillset. As a QA tester, you should be well versed in SQL. This is because most of the software systems include a lot of data in the backend. And there might be instances when you will have to validate this data and ensure that proper data is stored. And this might be in various databases like MySQL, Oracle, etc. Thus, you need to know some simple/ complex SQL queries to commit these tasks. If you have no prior experience, you can get proper online courses online on SQL. With proper, valid courses, you can gain knowledge and also get certifications to support it. Check out the various courses available. 

Test management tools: Test management is the process of documenting, executing and tracking test cases. Software testing requires a variety of tasks like planning manual testing, extracting data from automated tests, storing information about the status of the testing, manage various environments, gather information about the defects that have been found during testing, and so on. Various tools help in carrying out such operations, and these tools are known as test management tools. These tools are essential in QA testing as they save the testers a lot of hassles. These tools include almost every essential aspect to carry out testing, and thus save us from downloading a plethora of separate applications for each individual task. 

These tools are present to render the test management process a bit easier, with various built-in functions for tracking, automation, etc. Thus extensive programming knowledge is not required to operate these tools.a few of the best test management tools in the market right now are qTest, PractiTest, Zephyr, Test Collab, among others. There are quite a few learning guides online depending on the testing software that you will determine to use, and learning to use these tools is not difficult. The prerequisites required are minimal, and you also do not really require prior in-depth programming knowledge to implement these tools. 

Defect tracking tools : After any product has been developed, before deployment it is thoroughly checked for defects and bugs, so that these inconveniences won’t be caused after deployment. Managing, tracking, evaluating and solving these defects amongst thousands of lines of code is a mammoth task. Thus, special tools known as defect tracking tools come to our aid. These tools or systems basically help us to log all the bugs and defects. They help us to identify the bugs, present reports and graphs about the details of the defects, provide us with their history, and help identify and story them and essentially help us keep a track on them. 

The tools even aide testers in improving knowledge and increasing job efficiency. A few popular defect tracking tools are Airbrake, monday.com, backlog, reQtest, Kualitee, etc. There are a few prerequisites to learning bug tracking. Depending on which software you decide to use, you need to have prior knowledge about the particular programming language being used to implement said defect tracking tool, like, for example, Bugzilla uses MySQL and is written in Pearl, so to use that you need to have prior knowledge about both. There are many online courses regarding everything you need to learn to operate these tools and better your software testing.

Linux : Again, in this field, knowing Linux commands is very important. Majority of the software applications like Web-services, databases, application software etc are deployed on Linux machines. Thus, it is of paramount importance to have proper knowledge about Linux commands. And again, as it is a widely used language, you can easily find credible online courses and certifications for Linux.

Automation Tool: Now, this is one of the advanced concepts and a niche field. After some learning, if you find that you are interested in automation testing, you can take up courses to fully learn about automation tools. But, since it is such an advanced field, just learning about it is not enough. You need to have hands-on experience. So, be sure to use these tools on various projects. 

To conclude, if you don’t have prior experience, with proper training and certifications, you can easily get into this field and become a QA tester. Just be sure to go through the above points and get proper technical knowledge and get the certifications mentioned. We, at Janbask Training also provide online training courses. Thus, be sure to check them out and share your reviews with us!