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

In our country, there is still the opinion that a person must master a profession, and feed on it all his life. But this very life today is changing so quickly that for centuries the current scheme has been working worse. The economy is digitized, professions disappear, people are replaced by robots and chat bots. Therefore, today it is harder to build a comfortable future for yourself, choosing some direction in your youth. Alas, but we have not yet decided to radically change the profession. And the older a person is, the harder it is for him to accept the thought itself, not to decide on it: “How is it that I've been doing this for 20 years, gained experience, reputation, and then studying again as a schoolboy and starting from the bottom?” . Yes, the decision is not easy. But the stronger the economic and technological changes will affect employment, the more urgent will be the question of changing the profession for an increasing number of people. But if a person himself wants to do something new, at will, and not because of the pressure of circumstances, then nothing will prevent him.

One of the successful examples is the story of our colleague Helena, who after 40 years from a marketing specialist retrained 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 encourage someone to take active steps, or just help in choosing a new profession.
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At the age of 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 where they paid money - for lawyers and economists. I entered the Ekaterinburg Institute of National Economy, in the specialty “Commerce”, that is, I began to study economist. After graduating from the institute, she worked in regional banks for ten years. Then there was a move to Moscow, and again the banking sector. My work was mainly related to marketing, product promotion, advertising. For example, wrote promotional brochures on deposits. Somewhere from the mid-2000s, it became clear that the world is increasingly moving towards IT, towards software. And today, in any industry, software plays an important role. It happened with my profession.

I worked in the product development department for retail - 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 partly all 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 pressing such and such a button, fill out such and such an application, so that it would be easy and convenient for him.



In 2007, I first went to rest in the United States and literally fell in love with this country. Upon my return, I began to think that it would be cool to work there, to live for a while. I began to look for information, came across the “We are talking about the US” forum, and there I learned about the testing school of Mikhail Portnov in Silicon Valley. I started to watch the recordings on Michael's channel, where he often told success stories of his students. So began my acquaintance with the profession of testers.

I saw a lot of successful students of Portnov, and the more technical work was in my projects, the more often I thought: “Why 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 do I do? I am writing promotional brochures! At the same time, young people come to the bank to work, they are very energetic, with a good education, they have fluent English. And I want to be afloat and have in my hands some kind of profession that will feed me both at 50 and 60 years old, and at the same time I want to be in demand, to do an interesting job. And most importantly, I really wanted to work in the technology industry, which is a pioneer in the market so that I can make some contribution to changing the world.

I began to think. I already have projects, I put requirements, I conduct acceptance testing for business. So why don't I fully immerse myself in testing? And when I had a large project to transfer the product from one system to another, I tried to act like a real tester.

The first step was training "School beginners testers" Alexei Barantseva and his team. I recommend it to everyone who wants to open the door to IT. Here you will meet like-minded people, begin to develop technical thinking, get the excitement and motivation to move on. Next, I passed the training "SQL for testers" from the same team. SQL is a must have to start testing.

At the end of the project - it was April 2016 - I had the feeling that I was just a testing guru. But in fact, I was still completely in marketing, advertising, and communication with customers. In testing, I was still a novice, and even without 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, Zhenya from Houston (we were engaged on Skype). She helped me decide:

• Go to IT or not?
• If yes, then when?
• Do I need to get a second degree?
• Do I need to go into testing?
• Maybe I go to the project management?

Zhenya gave a hint: “ If you leave and look for work from scratch, then you will fall in salary. For you, the softest option is to try to switch 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 internal site of the bank 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 about testing for beginners, I also gave a link to it. She 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 unusual, because people are moving from IT to business, but from marketing to IT is a rarity . ” We talked, and he invited me to his team. I was just happy that they believed in me. And now, for a year now, I have been working in Quality Assurance (QA), in software testing, as a test manager and a UAT coordinator.

New profession and study

Of course, without technical education in testing is difficult. You need to learn a lot and constantly learn. In order to deal with a new topic, I first read articles, then I ask experienced colleagues to conduct an hour educational program for me. And then there are trainings. For example, recently there was an extremely useful two-day training Scrum Foundation. And when I first switched 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. It helped me a lot to understand who the test manager is and what he is doing, to direct the brain in the right direction.

I read little books, because I think 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 of Roman Savin “Testing the dot com”. It was curious to read “How is being tested on Google,” although I didn’t find anything particularly new there. For quick penetration into the philosophy of Scrum, I recommend “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 fulfill 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 that it needs.

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

For defect management, 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 topic from scratch, like Scrum principles.

We need to move forward, there are a lot of plans: for the next two years I have planned to study at various courses, from testing mobile applications to studying automation. In the first project, an automator works for us, to create autotests it uses Selenium Web-driver + Java, and the manual tester creates Jerkin-Cucumber usage scenarios that will later be used in Bamboo when they introduce continuous software development and delivery in the project. I need to understand this, so the automation plans for training are as follows:

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

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