First considerations

During Christmas 2015, always a good time for reflection, it dawned on me that my local (Dutch) market is changing and that this change has been happening for a while. Also I realized I am nearing 40 and that with the family responsibilities I have, it is simply not possible at the moment to be a career tiger and work 60 hours a week to enable my next promotion. More importantly, the amount of enjoyment and satisfaction received from these positions is lower than it should be. Everyone ought to have a job they like, for it energizes you to be a good partner, parent and colleague.

The market changes mentioned before lead to the following observations. The demand for management as a role has been dwindling, be it project, program or test management, there seem to be fewer people needed but so many people who are available. While this is something I have noticed in the Dutch market, I do not doubt it is something that can be seen in other places as well. Whenever any role comes up, it asks for high hands-on involvement and content knowledge on the subject being developed and implemented. In short, pure management seems to becoming less while management tasks are being asked of developers, testers and implementation consultants. This has lead to the shedding of management in organisations, again increasing the movement as more managers looking for work moved into an already saturated market.

So it is time for a change in the work I do, not only in the role but also in the content. Well, working in IT and not fancying management leaves you a plethora of technical roles. Not wanting to throw away my decade and a half experience, it needs to be something that makes sense and I can build upon. Further it needs to be interesting, challenging and there has to be some market demand. Considering I did over a decade of test management in all forms, shapes and roles, logic (actually my sister) tells me that it would be wise to continue in the field. Test automation it is, this must be useful, right? Having told upper management for several years that good automation experts are hard to find, I asked myself why not become that guy?

After doing market research on a variety of websites and talking to many people who work in the recruitment sphere to find out where the demand currently is and where it will likely develop to, I have found the following:

• SCRUM/Agile, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are hotter than ever
• Testing in this domain is a key component, if used properly with test automation
• Test automation has better market rates than management with up to 50% difference, which was a big surprise.
• Selenium Webdriver, Java, Agile/SCRUM and FitNesse score high in the demand list.
• Supporting this are skills and tools such as SQL, Toad, XML / SoapUI, Jira, Jenkins, JUnit/TestNG.

My next post will be on how one can go from having little to no knowledge on programming to be at least somewhat proficient in the domains that are apparently needed so much.