Tales of a Tester

Learning, learning, learning! Are you the new Mozart?

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” 

― Isaac Asimov

During job interviews the HR girls often ask us this question: why would you like to change your job?

Yes, more money. The first thing which pops into your mind if...you are young enough, at least from a financial point of view. If you already have enough money to pay the "costs of your life" (family, flat, car, etc), then this is not so obvious. In this case learning is the magic word. Learning something new, leaving your comfort zone, doing some unusual. 

At least for many of us.

In IT industry learning is easy and difficult at the same time. Easy, because there are so many new technologies, ideas and solutions coming up every single day that we can't even follow them. All you have to do is to make a choice, what to learn. And this makes it very difficult. It's like a long term investment. Where should I put my brain power, what's worth to learn it? I can start this one and that one, but if the stock price drops, shall I start something new?

Scientists say you need 10000 (ten thousand) hours practicing to become very professional in something. That's about 5-6 years, counting 8 hours /day, not counting weekends and holidays. Wow! Mozart started to practice music composition when he was 4. Was he a genius? Probably not. He just practiced a lot. A lot lot lot.

Do you have 10000 hours for learning e.g. test automation? No, you don't...you don't even have 2 hours a day, I bet.

Testers should learn different manual testing methods, they should learn bug tracking, different scripting or programming languages to automate their tests, continuous integration and regression (and tools), web technologies, databases, security issues, handling different mobile platforms, test management tools, other testing tools, BDD, TDD, html, http, etc, etc. 

Besides their work. 

Of course, sometimes you learn when you work. But after a time you don't. You just repeat the same things again and again. In this case there is only one solution: you need to find a new project...or an HR girl somewhere.

How much time do you have for learning on a usual day? How do you learn? What are your sources? 

Isn't the effictive learning the most important thing to learn first? 

Do you teach your children to learn? You should.

You can follow me on twitter: @GaborTWTR