Career progression in testing: the awesome power of influence

Within testing there’s no really defined career path beyond what the market sets for us. The market values SDIT and automation? Then people assume that’s the route for progression. But other than changing tools and techniques, how do we really progress as testers?

Influence.

Influence is our ability to sell a narrative to people, the force of our persuasiveness to win others over to a cause. This is vitally important as a tester as we need to be able to champion quality within others; either to gain time to test, conduct testing or fixing issues. It follows that the greater our seniority as a tester, the greater our influence expands (and vice versa) so I suggest that progression in testing isn’t just about tools and approach, it’s about influence.

Levels of influence

At an individual contributor level you’re able to influence your own work and testing. You may have to influence individual team manners to help you out, but your scope is mostly focused on your own work.

At a senior / lead level you influence a project team, directing the overall shape of quality and testing. We start talking to more than other team members, influencing stakeholders to help them shape their view of quality and the product. This also includes the influence of other testers and shaping how they think about their tasks, quality and testing too.

Moving beyond that, as a principal or staff engineer we have to direct a discipline of work. This might mean shaping and selling a type of testing throughout programmes of work or an organisation. We start to have to influence whole teams and groups of people at once and really be able to sell the benefits of this.

Progressing to a head of testing role means being able to influence at all levels. From an engineer in a team all the way up to the board level. You have to be able to know how to sell things to different types of people with different levels of depth needed.

(I’ve assumed some roles here, as we know our industry isn’t good at standardisation so your titles may vary. The main point is to show the progression of your sphere of influence from self > team > projects > organisations > exec.)

Why tech skills matter

When we think about progression in testing, frequently we think about cross training. Testers with manual skills are told to build automation skills, or maybe to learn a new framework and tool. We sometimes focus on breadth of knowledge and skill set, but we don’t question why that’s useful (beyond knowing the industry likes automators).

The answer is influence.

As you progress in your testing career, you have to be able to influence more and more people (and types of people). In order to influence more people, we need to know more about things that we want to influence them about. This means growing our knowledge in testing so that we can think (and influence) holistically.

If you only know about one thing, then you can only influence about that. You’ll deepen your knowledge and become better at influencing on that topic, which is great for individual work… but what about trying to influence in a wider context?

A more senior testing will be asked to set strategy for testing a while project. If you only know one thing, that’s all you can suggest. You can’t pull from a holistic wealth of experience to suggest the right things to do at the right time, meaning your strategy may not be pragmatic / useful and not be influential. Learning more tech skills gives us the knowledge to suggest the most useful thing to our teams to do, which is more influential.

This doesn’t always mean a super deep understanding of these skills, but enough to know when to use things and when to sell them into a team. Having a deeper knowledge of something comes more in handy when influencing to show you have credibility by implementing what you’ve sold.

Growing influence

Influence isn’t something that happens passively, you have to work at it. Working hard at something and being awesome at it quietly, where nobody sees it, isn’t going to grow your influence. You can be the best toolsmith or explorer out there, but if nobody knows about it then you’re not going to progress.

Growing our influence means being vocal and it means being a trusted advisor to different tiers of people. We have to be actively pushing information to people (proactively and reactively) to build up our sphere of influence.

• Speak up in meetings. This one’s easy, you can influence things by asking relevant questions and sharing useful information. Build the view that you’re someone people can come to for useful support and advice.
• Support others. Show you have knowledge and skills by working with others to solve problems. That can be one on one (in the small) or with t the whole team (in the large). Take on initiatives and tasks to help people.
• Run workshops / teaching. Share knowledge about things, this will build your influence as an expert. People will see the skills you have and understand you more, building influence.
• Being a thought leader. Why do people post on LinkedIn or blog? For greater reach of influence! Sharing ideas into the industry will increase your sphere of influence and have you talking to people at different levels, rather than just your team). You can also do this by sharing useful testing info in your organisations via slack posts.
• Share strategic thinking. Solving people’s problems for them is influential, especially when it’s a forwards looking solution. Researching and implementing new ways of working or sharing how to test with non testers will grow your influence. Build on this by sharing strategies for how to test now and grow this in the future (and why this is useful).
• Create allies by selling. Win people over to testing by selling it into projects and organisations, show people why they need testing (and you).

Conclusions

When we think about our careers it can be hard to know what to do to push us forwards. By focusing on how we increase our influence and what we need to achieve that, we can have a plan to gain seniority.

That might be learning more tech skills for sure, so long as we consider why these are useful to our overall progression. Don’t just learn skills in isolation, learn how to sell them to people and how to use them to share information and influence people.

As testers our role is not just to uncover information, it’s to share it. Our perceived seniority comes from how we’re able to share the information, rather than how we find it.