Test certification advantage

There’s been a lot of talk about tester certification lately. Particularly a lot of argument about why they’re very bad. But I’m all in favour of certification. Just hear me out.

It’s been said that the type of hiring managers who hire based on certifications are the probably going to be the types of hiring managers who don’t know much about testing, and/or want to use the certifications to “prove” how great their quality is. Well if that’s true, does that sound like the kind of person you want to work for? Unless your career dream is to be a blame-shouldering script monkey, I’m guessing the answer is “no”. So that’s excellent – now we have a warning system for spotting clueless managers who don’t know the worth of their testers.

Convenient!

This kind of red flag is just the kind of time-saver that good testers need when looking for a new job. And that’s time that good testers can spend on working on better ways to educate the testing community. Certification yay!

3 thoughts on “Test certification advantage

  1. Hi Trish,

    Cool! Pretty innovative thinking I must say and I liked it :) Thanks for the tip!!

    I like your blog design – nice colors :)

  2. My problem is not with certiification but on the general crappyness of the software related certs out there.

    Certification in general is a good idea as a benchmark for hiring people who are willing to dedicate themselves to the time to get that certificate and the knowledge it represents. After all, you would not hire a gas engineer without the safety cert. that tells you, the customer, that they are qualified to do their job.

    Perhaps the answer is making software testing an acedemic city and guilds type course which is based on classroom time, employer review and exams. Perhaps then, QA and testing sites will not be filled with reams of questions which read “Has anyone got the exam questions for …

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