Software Testing – A Front Runner Career Choice

Are you at the cross road of your career? Or perhaps a Software Engineer confused about which career path to embark on? Or maybe you a young student bombarded by an overflow of career choices; or just someone with a curious bent of mind who is amazed by the software world! Check out this blog to see if your calling is in the rapidly growing world – or dare I say widely expanding universe of software testing!

Times change; the no. 1 on Music Charts change; and so do Career Charts! There was a point in time, when if young teenagers were asked what their career choice would be – the prompt reply of the academically inclined would be – Doctors, Engineers, CAs, and MBAs! But now the career choices are far greater than they were a decade ago. For a moment let’s narrow the career scope and train our vision on engineers and more precisely on software engineers, and the clear dream job used to once be software development. Today, that is fast changing and from the many career options, software testing is fast gaining ground, more so post the pandemic. There are very solid reasons for this paradigm shift and mind you it’s clearly not just a post pandemic passing phase. The truth is that software testing is a career that has come to stay.

In the pandemic, digital transformation went into high gear acceleration with everyone and everything moving to online apps. Whether huge companies or the humble common man, whether big industrialists or the little school child – everyone had to move to the virtual space for their everyday needs. There was a mind boggling paradigm shift which brought in its wake an equally mind boggling demand for software developers and testers. Yes testers too and more so because of the tearing hurry to get well tested and fully certified apps to the market and ensure they do not crash or even have small glitches!

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics reveals that the employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 22 percent from 2020 to 2030, much faster than the average for all occupations.

Closer to home, Nasscom stated that in the current year FY 21-22, the Indian IT Sector is a net hirer as 1,38,000 new jobs were added to this sector (even while the year is still running). There were initiatives to train more than 2,50,000 employees in digital skills. It’s crystal clear then, that there is a huge dearth of skilled software testers and for those with the right skills there’s great demand.

Coming to Software Testing, Markets and Markets – a renowned market research company states that the global Automation Testing market size which was forecasted at USD 20.7 billion in 2021 is expected to grow to USD 49.9 billion by 2026 – a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.2% during the forecast period! The highest CAGR is expected to be in the APAC region in the major economies, such as Australia, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Hong Kong and especially India and China which have very large customer bases. The report mentions that the governments are taking initiatives for rapid adoption of new technologies like AI and ML, automation, IoT, mobile and web-based applications, cloud-based services, and other technologies.

While on number crunching, let’s validate the statistics from yet another source. According to a report by PRNewswire, the software testing services market has the potential to grow by USD 34.49 billion during 2021-2025, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 12.39%.

These forecasts are solidly backed by the fact that there is a rapid adoption of advanced technologies, further supported by the tremendous spurt in e-commerce and many other online activities, following the pandemic. It is no wonder then that tech giant like TCS, Infosys, Accenture etc. are putting their money where their mouth is, and setting up separate teams for building software for e-commerce platforms – no prizes for guessing where the future belongs! Web and Mobile Apps have become a way of life and with this, Software Testing is now no longer a tail-end career, but a major and much sought field.

The World Quality Report 2020-21 states that Quality Assurance (QA) is integral to digital transformation and that QA (a synonym for Software Testing), is evolving from serving as an independent function within software delivery organisations to become an integral and inclusive part of the team and delivery lifecycle as digital transformation efforts expand. QA professionals are no longer solely responsible for testing and finding defects, but now must ensure that the rest of the software delivery team instills quality in their work. This report again validates the fact that the scope, responsibilities and importance of Software Testers is indeed expanding.

A survey by Applitools revealed that with the huge digital shift made by most companies, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain quality when there is a need to cover an average of 300,000 pages and screens daily for a typical app. It is obvious then that those with expertise in automated testing will be in high demand – because app downtime brings with it huge costs in terms of money, efforts, embarrassment and loss of credibility.

These surveys, reports, and the ground realities are all unanimous in their take that software testing is truly a front runner in the career race. Long gone are the days when software testers felt like underdogs or runners-up among their peers in software engineering. Today software testers are proud of their career choice, well settled in the bright career paths, happy with the respect and appreciation of family and friends and last but not the least, the moolah is also awesome!

Before I sign off, let’s look at one more interesting byte! Practitiest in its 2021 Testing and Survey Report collated the responses of 1500 software professionals globally and what’s interesting to note is that 71% of the respondents said that their incomes were not affected by the pandemic – a time when people in other sectors were losing jobs overnight and salaries were being cut like never before! This fact is actually not surprising considering that the pandemic brought a paradigm shift to digitization in the way business and life itself, was conducted.

Remember, the tech giants are investing heavily into the software space – a clear indication of their long term perspective. It will be wise then, to take their lead and focus your time and energy into developing your skills in this sector too. The awesome news is that you can be part of the booming software testing industry in just 3 months!

If Software Testing is a field you’d like to explore, visit us at www.mypathglow.com and sign up for our Full Stack Software Testing Course which is professionally designed by industry experts, to get you industry-ready in just 3 months.