From a marketer to a software tester - a change in profession after 40? Why not

In our country, there is still an opinion that a person should master some profession and feed on it all his life. But this very life today is changing so quickly that for centuries the current scheme works worse. The economy is digitized, professions disappear, people are replaced by robots and chat bots. Therefore, today it is becoming increasingly difficult to build a prosperous future by choosing a direction in youth. Alas, it is not yet customary for us to radically change the profession. And the older the person, the more difficult it is for him to accept the idea itself, not just dare to do it: “How is it that I have been doing this for 20 years, I have gained experience, reputation, and then again to learn as a schoolboy and start from the bottom?” . Yes, the decision is not easy. But the stronger economic and technological changes affect employment, the more relevant will be the question of changing a profession for an increasing number of people.

One of the successful examples is the story of our colleague Elena, who, after 40 years from a marketer, has been re-qualified as a software tester. Her word.

Hello! Now in Russia it is very difficult for women after 40 to look for work. Maybe my story will push someone to take active steps, or just help in choosing a new profession.

At 17, I graduated from high school, and I had to choose where to go to study. I absolutely did not understand what to do. It was 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, so everyone went to the place where they paid money - for lawyers and economists. I entered the Yekaterinburg Institute of National Economy, majoring in Commerce, that is, I began to study as an economist. After graduating from the institute, she worked for ten years in regional banks. Then there was a move to Moscow, and again the banking sector. My work was mainly related to marketing, product promotion, and advertising. For example, she wrote advertising brochures on deposits. Somewhere from the mid-2000s, it became clear that the world is increasingly moving toward IT, towards software. And today, software plays an important role in any industry. It happened with my profession.

I worked in the retail product development department - these are credit and debit cards, deposits. All these products live in a certain software system. It needed to be developed, tested, it was necessary to train front-office employees how to work in this system. And in part, all of these tasks fell on me as a product manager. I began to communicate more and more with IT specialists, formulating and clarifying system requirements. She explained how the system should work so that the end user could, for example, by clicking a certain button, fill out such a statement so that it would be easy and convenient.



In 2007, I first went on vacation in the United States and literally fell in love with this country. Upon returning, I began to think that it would be cool to work there, to live for a while. I began to search for information, came across the forum “We are talking about the US”, and there she found out about Mikhail Portnov’s testing school in Silicon Valley. She began to watch records on Michael’s channel, where he often told the success stories of his students. Thus began my acquaintance with the profession of a tester.

I saw many successful Portnov students, and the more technical work there was in my projects, the more often I thought: “What am I worse? I, too, can work in the advanced technology in demand around the world. ” When the decision was ripe, I was already 40 years old (now 43), and what am I doing? I am writing advertising brochures! At the same time, young people come to work in the bank, they are very energetic, with a good education, they have fluent English. And I want to be afloat and have in my hands some profession that will feed me at 50 and 60, and at the same time I want to be in demand, to do interesting work. And most importantly, I really wanted to work in the technology industry, which is a pioneer in the market, so that I could make some contribution to changing the world.

I began to think. After all, I already have projects, I set requirements, conduct acceptance testing for businesses. So why don’t I immerse myself in testing? And when I had a major project to transfer the product from one system to another, I tried to act as a real tester.

The first step was the training “School for beginner testers” by Alexei Barantsev and his team. I recommend it to everyone who wants to open the door to IT for themselves. Here you will meet like-minded people, begin to develop technical thinking, get excitement and motivation to move on. Then I went through the training "SQL for testers" from the same team. SQL is a must have for starting in testing.

At the end of the project - it was April 2016 - I had the feeling that I was already just a testing guru. But in fact, I was still head over heels in marketing, advertising, communications with clients. In testing, I was still a beginner, and even without a technical education. There were a lot of doubts and questions that needed to be answered by myself. I needed help to deal with all this. I hired a career coach, Eugene from Houston (we studied on Skype). She helped me decide:

• Leave for IT or not?
• If yes, then when?
• Do I need to get a second higher?
• Do I need to go to testing?
• Maybe I should go to project management?

Eugene gave a hint: “ If you leave and look for work from scratch, you will fall in wages. For you, the softest option is to try switching from marketing to IT in your own bank. There will be less stress, you can save your salary, you know people and the environment . ”

I went to the bank’s internal website and a miracle happened - there was a vacancy in the testing department. I wrote a letter to the head of the department, attached a link to my profile on LinkedIn. By that time, I had written an article on testing for beginners, I also gave a link to it. I was very worried about how Alexey, the head of the testing department, would react. When he read all this, he said: “Yes. The case is interesting, very non-standard, because people are moving from IT to business, but it is very rare to move from marketing to IT . ” We talked and he invited me to his team. I was just happy that they believed in me. And now it's been a year since I worked in Quality Assurance (QA), in software testing, as a test manager and UAT coordinator.

New profession and study

Of course, without technical education in testing is difficult. You need to learn a lot, and learn constantly. To deal with the new topic, I first read the articles, then I ask experienced colleagues to spend an hour educational program for me. And then the trainings. For example, recently there was an extremely useful two-day Scrum Foundation training. And when I just moved to QA as a test manager, I immediately went to the two-month course "School of test managers v.2.0" in parallel with the project. This helped me a lot to understand who the test manager is and what he is doing, to direct my brains in the right direction.

I read little books, because I think that they have a lot of water and marketing. I prefer to google and read in detail. But still, I would recommend to beginners, though the old, but relevant and motivating book by Roman Savin “Testing dot com.” It was interesting to read “How they test on Google”, although I did not find anything particularly new there. For a quick insight into the Scrum philosophy, I recommend the “Scrum a pocket guide, A smart travel companion”.

I am engaged in hiring testers, including beginners, test analysis, test case design, testing, defect management, UAT. That is, I perform the role of a bridge between business and IT, which helps both worlds to speak the same language so that the business receives the software product that it needs.

Now I have two major projects for product development for corporate clients in my work. One project on the Waterfall methodology for developing a web application, jBoss application server, Java backend. The second project uses the Scrum framework to develop a desktop application in C ++. Both applications actively use bus services (ESB), MQ message queues (IBM product). Therefore, message queues are the first thing I had to deal with.

To manage defects, both teams use the HP ALM product with synchronization in Jira. Since there are problems with synchronization, now we are piloting one of the Jira plug-ins for bug tracking.

I really like the direction of CI / CD - automatic deployment, continuous delivery and continuous development. A lot of tools and frameworks are being created in this area now. In the Scrum team, we are implementing auto-deployment using Bamboo, so I also had to learn the CI / CD theme from scratch, as well as the principles of Scrum.

We need to move forward, there are a lot of plans: for the next two years I plan to study at different courses, from testing mobile applications to studying automation. In the first project, we have an automation tool, for creating autotests, it uses Selenium Web-driver + Java, and the manual tester creates Jerkin-Cucumber usage scenarios, which will subsequently be used in Bamboo, when the project will implement continuous development and delivery of software. I need to understand this, so automation plans for training are:

• Selenium starter course.
• Python for testers.
• Selenium WebDriver, full course.
• Java for testers.

I was able to radically change my profession after 40 years. Going to IT, I got the opportunity to work with very interesting technologies and modern areas. For example, our bank is now actively working with startups, and I have already taken part in testing new products in biometrics. The important point is that I managed not to lose my salary at all. And I know that if I leave for America or Singapore tomorrow, then in a month or two I will definitely find work in QA, since English allows.