How Becoming a Software Tester Changed My Fairytale for the Better
Everyone dreams of a fairytale life for themselves, right? I know I definitely did and mine went along the typical lines of finding “The one”, getting married, building a forever house, and having a few kids. But never did I ever think along the lines of a career, what would I actually do in and around all of this? I had no idea. It wasn’t until I was twenty-three that this realisation hit me. I literally had no idea what I wanted to do for a career. A thing that I could totally have alongside the rest of my fairytale. But what did that career look like for me? What was I interested in enough that I could spend forty hours a week doing? And how was I even going to discover my career options?
My journey in answering this big question begins back at the beginning of 2016. I’d just landed a part time job at Trade Me as a Customer Service Representative (CSR) while I finished the last year of my Industrial Design degree. Once I finished up my degree later that year I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do job wise. However, I did know that it wasn’t going to be anything to do with Industrial Design. So to keep things simple I moved to full time hours in my job at Trade Me. I spent the next few months enjoying not being a student, having money to spend, and being able to do a bit of travel overseas.
Life was great and it was fun, but then things changed and after a year and a half in my CSR job I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. It was at this moment that I had my big realisation. I was twenty three years old and was still holding onto my perfect fairytale life. But what about a job or career. What was I actually going to do with my life in and around everything else?
It was then August 2017 when I began to work out what I was interested in pursuing as a career. At this point, I knew I enjoyed working at Trade Me, I liked the people that I worked with, and I’d seen the company support people moving into other roles. So I thought, why can’t I do that too?!
I set about having a big think about what role I could potentially move into at Trade Me. I wondered if I could move into a Design role as I’ve got a degree in design and I really enjoyed the graphic design aspect of my studies. Or could I be a Business Analyst as I’m a great knowledge builder, I like to know all of the business rules, and how things work. Or could I be a tester because that ‘Testing for non-testers’ workshop that I went to at work was pretty fun and it’d mean that I’d get to resolve the issues that users always complain to me about in my CSR role.
With my list of potential careers in hand I had a big chat to the Head of Customer Service. He was super into supporting development opportunities even if it was to move out of Customer Service and to somewhere else within the company, which was perfect for me! We popped Software Tester at the top of the list and got started on talking to the right people about the next steps.
At this point it was September 2017 and I’d set a goal for myself that I needed to either have an ‘adult’ job at Trade Me or somewhere else by May 2018. That gave me 9 months to make a big change in my life.
Then I jumped head first into discovering if a career as a Software Tester was the right fit for me. Previously my evenings and weekends were spent watching Netflix and gaming. Now they were spent:
- Reading up on testing
- Perusing testing blogs
- Learning (very) basic SQL
- Logging Trade Me site bugs that either myself or members found
- Practicing testing by comparing my draft test plans against the already finished test plans on stories/cases
- Becoming the CSR go-to person in incidents on production
Then at work, I was lucky enough to get to spend an hour or two a week sitting with different testers from around the business for a ‘shadow session’. This meant I could actually see what they did in their day to day work and gave me the opportunity to do ‘actual’ testing of the cases that were being developed.
I soon realised that the testing role included a bunch of things that I enjoy like problem solving, understanding how things work, technical stuff, collaborating with others, building cool stuff and a bunch of other stuff — I was totally keen for a career in testing!
The next step in my journey was to kick off this whole career thing and get a new and shiny Software Tester job! Since I had little to no experience of actual testing this was going to prove somewhat tough.
On my way to landing my first role I went through a few ups and downs. The first two roles that I applied for internally within Trade Me had preferred candidates and so I unfortunately didn’t get those ones. However, I did learn a whole lot from going through the process for those roles. I gained experience in interviewing for a Software Tester role, in doing a technical test, and I made some people connections which would come in handy soon enough.
Then came the moment that I landed the perfect job in April 2018. Word had gotten around that I was super keen on moving into a testing role and that I’d be the perfect fit for an upcoming role. I very soon became the preferred candidate — who me? Yes me!
A few days went past where I went through the process of having a few chats with the hiring manager, and then the role was advertised internally asking for expressions of interests from others. Then, finally in the space of less than a week of having been approached about the role I was given a job offer! I’d finally met my goal and was all set to start my new and exciting job in just a few weeks time — I was so excited!
Finally in May 2018 I started my shiny new role as a Software Tester at Trade Me. Right from the day one I loved it and the role ended up being so much more than I expected. I got too:
- Test a whole range of things across the full stack and more
- Own the deploy process from test through to production
- Work with a bunch of amazing people across a few different agile squads
- Be involved in the product side of projects
- Learn about and build automation tests
- And so much more
It’s all worked out perfectly and I’ve found a job that I actually enjoy doing everyday. It also challenges me and has given me so many opportunities to learn and develop in a bunch of different areas — it’s fabulous!
So now at twenty five years old I’ve answered my first big life question and added an amazing career aspect to my fairytale. Now it’s just a case of seeing how the rest of it will pan out. Or maybe other parts of it will change slightly too? Who knows at this point but either way I’m excited to see what the future holds for me!
