The Software Tester’s Journey with Nicola Lindgren and Vernon Richards

[00:00:00] In a land of testers, far and wide they journeyed. Seeking answers, seeking skills, seeking a better way. Through the hills they wandered, through treacherous terrain. But then they heard a tale, a podcast they had to obey. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.

[00:00:34] Joe Colantonio Hey, do you want to know how to advance your career in software testing? If so, you're in for a treat because today, we have Nicola and Vernon joining us to talk all about The Software Tester's Journey, a new book that they publish, the both awesome experts as well as we're going to dive into probably all kinds of things, but mainly focus on this book. If you don't know, Nicola is a platform manager based in Sweden, is an international conference speaker, prolific blogger, lifelong learner in testing agile in leadership. She also has a pretty cool YouTube channel as well that I will have a link for down below. And she has experience as a test coach, test analyst, test automation engineer, test lead, and she started meet ups in I think was Australia and Stockholm and taught software testing classes, runs workshops, mentors tests, she knows all the things. So I'm really excited to have her on the show. We also have Vernon Richard joining us, who is a quality coaching tester. He helps teams improve products by linking quality with software testing. He's also a senior expert or senior software, a quality engineer, and runs Adobe of Quality, a platform focused on quality and testing. He presents a bunch of different conferences, leads training, workshops, blogs and co-hosts the Vernon Richards Show and the both authors of the books The Software Tester's Journey. Really excited to dive in. You don't want to miss it. Check it out.

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[00:04:08] Joe Colantonio Hey, welcome to The Guild.

[00:04:13] Nicola Lindgren Thank you. It's great to be here.

[00:04:15] Joe Colantonio Hey, Vernon.

[00:04:16] Vernon Richards Greetings. Thanks for having us on. Appreciate it.

[00:04:19] Joe Colantonio Awesome. Yeah. Great to have you both here. All right, I'm just curious to know, anytime anyone writes a book like who came up with the idea? How did you decide to kind of peer author it? What's the genesis of it?

[00:04:30] Nicola Lindgren Yes, it was my idea. I came up with the idea, I think, sometime in mid to late 2022, and I approached Vernon because there were certain topics that I thought the book had to do that I didn't have enough knowledge or experience in and given Vernon's experience but as well as I thought his interest and career as well, I approached him and said, Hello, would you be interested in running a book with me? And the fortunately, he said yes.

[00:05:01] Joe Colantonio Have you known each other before that?

[00:05:02] Vernon Richards Yeah.

[00:05:04] Nicola Lindgren I mean, he might have not remembered when we first met, but we met at his bash 2016. And then I think we might have crossed paths a few other times, but at least that's a path different time, I remember.

[00:05:17] Vernon Richards Yeah, you were. I think you were in New Zealand at that time. You traveled a long way?

[00:05:23] Nicola Lindgren No, I was. I had already moved to Sweden. That's what that meant. Yeah.

[00:05:28] Vernon Richards Okay. But I've been following you since you were in New Zealand. So. Yeah. Kind of knew you a long time. I hadn't met you before.

[00:05:37] Nicola Lindgren You know Twitter? Yeah.

[00:05:40] Joe Colantonio Vernon, what are your thoughts when she approaches said, How would you like to write a book?

[00:05:44] Vernon Richards Easy. Yes. So Nicola had written a book called How to Start Your Software Testing Career. And it was very good. It was very cool. And so when she said, Look, I want to write another book because there's some other topics I would like to cover. It was an easy yes because we seemed to have a similar mindset on how we saw software testing careers. We were both writing a lot and creating a lot of content at the time. So it was just, it was super easy.

[00:06:12] Joe Colantonio All right. Why a book on this topic then? A lot of times people don't think testing's a real career or they think it's like a stepping stone. Why a topic on testing software testing or careers?

[00:06:24] Nicola Lindgren For me, I thought there was a gap in the market for this. While, yes, maybe people think that it's a stepping stone towards other careers and such, it is actually a career that many people do take seriously and it's great for those people. But then we also do have a chapter in the book which talks about moving away from testing and talking about how people use a skillset gain and testing to move on to other paths because I guess like with any career, not just with testing, sometimes people do something for a few years or 10 years or 20 years and then they make transition to something else. So we wanted to think about that journey people go on. So yeah.

[00:07:00] Vernon Richards For me, somebody I think it was back in 2022, somebody asked me this question. They were like, okay, so I've been a manual tester, doing air quotes, if you can't see that doing. I've been a manual tester for a period of time. What do I do next? Like, where can I go next? So I started to talk a lot about that. I wrote a couple of blog post about it, and then I turned that blog post into a presentation. I delivered that as a keynote once or twice. And so I already had some ideas in that direction. So when Nicola approached me saying, I want to write this book about careers, I was like, Of course, I'm going to help you write that book because that's what's on my mind right now. So yeah.

[00:07:38] Joe Colantonio Love it. And Nicola, you're a platform manager, so did you make that transition from a tester to like management? And what was that like?

[00:07:45] Nicola Lindgren Before I was a quality engineering manager and then it was platform manager due to a reorg. So the role was changed for me. And I guess the change in, if I'm talking about specific platform management at managing people would be the shift in perspective. Thinking more big picture, thinking not necessarily about testing itself always that having that insight as to how people proceed testing. I had this when I was working, as I see in teams or individual contributor in teams. I remember being like testing was like the main focus. It was the star of the show always. And then I remember thinking, why don't people care about testing quality? And I cared a lot of I still care about quality, they could be wrong. But I could somehow take it personally in a weird way when people didn't care about testing quality as much. And then when you take a step back and you see, okay, testing is a part of software development, and then there's a push for features, you see that in actual testing or when you want extra resources or people and the money that comes with it, the way testing is perceived. People may think only of test cases are only bugs. People thinking that more testing means that you're going to find all the bugs. That insight has been I think the most interesting for me.

[00:09:03] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And I think you dive into all these topics, but the book is broken into nine chapters. The first one is career choices for testers. And you do have one on managing expectations and managing up. So I guess let's set the field here. What are the career choices for testers?

[00:09:20] Vernon Richards This is the World according to Vernon. Okay, so bear that in mind. But I think the way I think about it is there are like 3 different dimensions that impact this the most. One is the technology, one is people, and one is the business. These are the things that determine where our focus is in the job. So as Nicola was just saying, you could have quite a people focused and approach. And so that might take you down the leadership or the management direction. You might be someone like yourself who's like, I'm very much into technology, so I'm going to get deep into the tooling and how and what was the architecture of this thing mean and how are we going to implement this solution, etc.. And then you can have a more business focused product focus. How are we making money from this thing? And then depending on where the emphasis is and it is more of an emphasis, I don't think you can really ignore anyone of those three things completely. I don't think you'll get very far if you completely say, I'm just going to ignore technology and focus on people and money. You're not going to get from. It's more of an emphasis, but depending on where your emphasis is, will dictate which kind of roll that you take. I'm very much on the people side, I think. If I had to pick one of the three, I'm much more of a people person, but I like all three of those things. I think that's what has helped me achieve whatever success I've had in my career. It's been able it's been because of that appreciation for I like people, I have an appreciation for the technology, and I have an appreciation for the fact that we have to make money. Like there's the business. The role exists to serve a particular audience, and the more you can tie what you're doing in testing to that, the better.

[00:11:03] Joe Colantonio Well, I 100% agree. Do you see that as a roadblock? A lot of people don't emphasize the value that they bring into a project. And therefore, when it does come time to cuts or layoffs like these people never advocate for themselves. But the fact that they do and get rid of them, I don't know if that's too harsh, but that's what I see sometimes I wonder.

[00:11:20] Speaker 4 How to think something similar. I don't know if the decision makers are having in their head is these people never advocate for themselves, so they're out of here. It's probably more they look at the landscape as they're making a decision about we need to go forward less people. Who needs to be on this ship to keep it moving and able to weather any storm because we're going to have less people. Who the people that we've got to have with this. And if you haven't done a great job of articulating your value, that might reduce your odds of staying on. But it's not a matter of always being able to talk your way into or out of these situations because maybe a company just doesn't need somebody with your skill. I don't want anybody to think that they have failed in some way because they've been laid off or made redundant. I've just been made redundant. I got made redundant a month ago. Happily, I've got myself a new job now, but being made redundant is not. I don't think necessarily it says anything about you as an individual, but you can use it as a learning opportunity to say, okay, how could I have avoided this if that is the outcome that I wanted? I mean, you can start to think about how does what I do impacts the business and how can I articulate that narrative so that people understand it and my value is clear and apparent. Hope that make sense.

[00:12:38] Nicola Lindgren Yeah. I feel like with redundancies and picking people, the impression I also get is how is it perceived on shifting your responsibilities to other people and how doable that is, because you just Vernon, illustrated that let's say you currently have 100 people. We need to get down to 70 and you're trying to figure out, okay, which 30 people do you need to cut? But then what comes to my head is also you're thinking, okay, with the people which roles are more likely to be able to absorb those others. Maybe with the developer we can see these developers absorbing the test responsibilities, but then the other way around can be harder for people to imagine. And I found it was years ago for me with being laid off. But I remember the QA team was hit hard and this is happening that would even when you're advocating for value, it's this intangible thing where you're providing information, you're reducing risk that is concrete deliverables that are harder to show compared to other roles. And then if you're going to talk about, say, preventing bugs, building good Perseus, I would also say the funny thing is, if you're that good of a tester, you could make yourself seem like you're not as needed because you're at that good. And that's like the double edged sword that that you could end up in because they think, well, is this highly skilled person here that we're paying this much for? And then you kind of forget actually, it's a short memory. The reason that things are going so well is because of all the work they put in and all the glue work and then this bulwark they're doing behind the scenes. And that part, honestly, it sucks.

[00:14:16] Vernon Richards There's this really good article, can't remember the name of the woman who wrote the book. She's talking about being an SRE. And the article was basically about what you just said, Nicola, is that when I am really effective at my job, nothing happens. Like when I nail it, when I crush it in my job.

[00:14:33] Joe Colantonio Right Yeah, right.

[00:14:34] Vernon Richards Nothing happens. And so the people are like, what are you doing? Like, nothing happened. Exactly. Nothing happened because I'm awesome. You're welcome.

[00:14:43] Joe Colantonio Yeah. I think we've all mentioned we've been laid off at some point. I was laid off five years ago. Nicola sound you were laid off at some point and then you were recently laid off. I know a lot of people are going through this, and I know it's tough, but how do you get a job so quick? I know other testers that were in the market for months recently, so happy to hear that you got a new job. Any tips for anyone that's in the same boat you were in and how were you able to get the next gig?

[00:15:10] Vernon Richards Feeling blessed right now. That is part of it, but I think a big part of it, ironically, because check this out. We released the book the day we released the book the following day I got made redundant, so it was timely because I could use the advice that we gave people in the book. And I think it basically came down to networking. It basically came down to being able to go to my peers and the people I've met in my network can say, Hey, this is what happened. If you know of any openings fit me? Here with the problems that I like to solve, and here are the context in which I can really help solve them in. So if you know anybody with this kind of problem, let me know. And I was lucky enough, someone in my network alerted me to the lead, and then they put me in touch and then it kind of went from there. I think that was probably the number one factor. It's not that I'm some kind of bloody genius or anything like that. It was purely the network. And it's almost like leveraging is easier if you think about it. Didn't see me looking on my own. And then 10, 20 however many people scanning the environment and I think that was the difference. And then also, it's the difference between applying for a job by hitting a button on LinkedIn and one human telling another human that this other human is worth talking to and that that packs a punch is the difference between reading a Google review for a restaurant and me saying, Hey, Joe, this restaurant downtown is absolutely amazing. Go check it out. Okay, fine. I'll check it out. It's that kind of energy that you're looking for. And I was lucky enough to be able to make that happen for me.

[00:16:44] Joe Colantonio Now, it's a great point. I think in 25 years, I've only had one job where I actually just applied click and a button. Everything else was due, just people moving on and giving me a new job. Networking like you said. So you have a whole chapter on this. It is chapter 6. So Nicola, now you are a manager. You get hit up a lot like weird approaches that may not be optimal for networking. Do you have any suggestions someone is looking for jobs. You think where you work looks interesting. Like how do you like helps someone to be a good candidate for a position at a company that they may want to approach?

[00:17:17] Nicola Lindgren I could talk about what I could approach with and I could explain why it's not the best approach. And then I could also share what actually works. I often get people approach me saying that I'm looking for a job and if I know of anything and then we're not currently hiring at the moment, and that during those times we were in hiring. When I said, when I replied to this message and I said, No, we're not hiring, they didn't go, Well, then come back to me or let me know when you're hiring. And I'm thinking to myself, Well, I'm not going to remember this conversation. There's nothing memorable about it. Is this? It's one of many. And then given the effort that was put into the conversation, I could also maybe assume that they pretty much sent the same copy text message to other hiring managers. What I have seen done well is some people they showed they'd done the research on me and I like it, doesn't like they see an article I shared on LinkedIn or something they posted. They're specific as to why they want to work at the company, but at least there's some sort of a detail or effort that's put in. And I appreciate that. With networking, one thing that I don't think Vernon explicitly said is that networking pays is like an investment because Vernon didn't just start networking when he needed a job. He's pretty much been networking this whole time, at least like since I've known he's been networking since at least 9 years, probably longer. So then I would advise people when it comes to networking, to start building those relationships that messaging people, commenting on people's posts say thanks for sharing, sharing with them a link, saying, I saw that you shared this, maybe this other article you might find interesting because you want a give and take. And then you also need to be top of mind because like, let's say an opportunity comes up and you start hiring like, let's say I started hiring tomorrow, I'm not going to remember some sort of interaction I had back in February or March about a candidate who could have been suitable then, you need to be top of mind. So it needs into action that happened like 1 or 2 months ago. I'm more likely to remember. So there's that combination of things. That's my 2 cents.

[00:19:26] Vernon Richards Absolutely genius. Yeah. And if I can add to Nicola touched something there. Don't just show up and immediately say, I want this and I want this and I need this and you need to do this for me and etc., etc. That is not, you will be memorable for the wrong reasons. What you should do is, the clue in social media. It's social. The trick to networking is to be helpful and friendly and not overbearing. I think in the book I call it, don't be an energy vampire. Don't just suck all the energy out of the relationship. Just be cool. Just be friendly with somebody and genuine. And then over the course of time, that seed will grow into something real later.

[00:20:11] Joe Colantonio 100% agree. And I love how you said commenting on posts and things like that. Also putting yourself out there. I know both of you put yourself out there. You draw a lot and I know you don't actually ever. Me neither one of you. If someone said, Hey, do you know, blah, blah, blah, do you know Vernon? Do you know Nicola? I have a job open. I'd be like, Oh! yeah, they did this, this and this. I follow them all the time. That helps. So you're sowing seeds without even being in your face networking per se just by contributing to the community. Is that like a way you could do it if someone's even more like introverted just now commenting on a post, you don't have to be very outgoing, creating a blog post don't have to be very outgoing type deal.

[00:20:46] Nicola Lindgren For company and post. I think you'd have to do it frequently. Like you couldn't just comment once. Then for writing a blog post, not the quantity would probably would have to be as much to feel alone. If I wrote this explicitly in the book about lowering the risk threshold of hiring, because like when you hire someone, you are taking a risk with any person, the way I think networking so effective and referrals which were referred to is the risk is perceived to be lower because you're banking on the trust that a current employee already has or the framed that the current employee already has. But then when you're like the way I see it, when you share your thoughts online of what you believe, then you're become more like this known of like, okay, this is how they perceive things, this is what they believe. And I think that can work in your favor.

[00:21:36] Vernon Richards I couldn't agree more. I think in 2024, it's verging on mandatory that you have some kind of online paper trail, something along those lines. And Nicola is right. And I love that you said this Joe, there's a continuum. At one end, you can have a YouTube channel, you can have a blog that takes a certain amount of time and energy at one end, and then at the other end, you're doing absolutely nothing. Being at this end is inadvisable. But commenting on stuff to me feels like the least energy draining and time consuming thing that you can do. And it absolutely helps. If you're the person who takes an already good post from somebody could be on Linked in, it could be a blog, it could be each video, anything, and then you're adding an insightful comment or it could be something that makes people laugh or it could be anything. But you're contributing to the conversation in some way that is more than enough, because what you want is that association with, Oh! I've seen Joe commenting on these, on such and such before. Yeah, he seems like a smart dude. That's what you and that's all it takes. To Nicola's point there will take a level of consistency. You can't just do it once in a blue moon. I think it's more effective to do it consistently.

[00:22:50] Joe Colantonio 100%. Like I said, you have a whole chapter on networking your way to success. How is this different in Chapter 7, which is job hunting. What is unique to job hunting?

[00:22:57] Vernon Richards Job hunting has an extremely specific goal that you're trying to achieve. Whereas like Nicola was saying, networking is just here's how you make connections with people and here are some ways you can do this in effectively, here are some ways you can do this effectively. And if you're not sure why this is a good idea, let's make the argument for why this is a good idea and then we will get into how you do it. Job hunting is very much I am in hunter mode like I am. I need to get a job, like I'm looking for a job for whatever reason. Here are some tips from us as people that have lots for jobs and people who hire people looking for jobs. So that's how I would describe the difference.

[00:23:40] Nicola Lindgren And we have concrete advice on first. We talk about like hot to network events, what sort of events you could network at things to be mindful of and then say what the job hunting is specific advice on CV's or cover letters on your LinkedIn profile, how to optimize that, talking to your recruiters and the different types of interviews that you could expect, because I find it could depend slightly on the company size that the expectations and what you're trying to achieve at each interview stage varies. Because if I was going to say like at the screening stage, a recruiter, they've got a specific purpose they're trying to achieve and then the hiring manager has one and it might be a team interview. So we talk about those specifics.

[00:24:22] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. I see them both entwined like you should see look as yourself in the future, networking. I was happily employed by shared information, not knowing that eventually I would be laid off and I have to go job hunting. So that's almost like laying the path or seeds out there that no, you never know what's going to happen. For me in networking that could lead to a job or you may be made redundant and then, make your life that much easier with the job hunt. Sure.

[00:24:47] Nicola Lindgren And the good thing with networking is it's not just about like this you think is your future self that benefits, but there's also your current network that benefits from your network and then your future connections. Because like for me, I like to connect people, so maybe I don't have something to gain, but I'm like, you should meet him and you should meet her and so on. And it's quite like being able to help create those like, women situations.

[00:25:12] Joe Colantonio Awesome. All right. So chapter 8 is going independent, why would anyone want to go independent? I'm independent now for 5 years. It's kind of rough, but like when would this be a good option for someone?

[00:25:22] Vernon Richards You might feel like you don't have access to the levers that you want to make your life better. You might feel like you could earn more money. By going independent. It usually is around that or autonomy and agency peace, that perspective, it's like, well, I need more agency, I need more autonomy. I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of opinions, and maybe I could have more influence if I went independent and I was hired as a freelancer. You've probably possibly been in a company that's had that you're working alongside freelancers. Think to yourself, Wow! these people are earning way more money than me and they're doing the same job. But it's not all rainbows and parties and stuff. There's-.

[00:26:08] Nicola Lindgren Unicorns

[00:26:11] Vernon Richards Unicorns. Yeah, rainbows and unicorns. It's quite different. And it's not for everybody. It has its pros and cons. So yeah, that's was the reason I did it. I did it because it felt like as a freelancer, you had more autonomy and on top of that you earned more money. And I was like, Well, that's a pretty persuasive combination of characteristics. I'll go for it. But it's actually there are some downsides. There are some cons. It's not all pros.

[00:26:37] Joe Colantonio Yeah, this might be lame. The reason why I love it, as in my calendar from 12 to 1, the only thing I really have my calendars take a nap. And so you could do that if you're independent. I don't know if you could do that when you work full time, but that's the biggest benefit I've come up with in 5 years. Nicola, any ideas? Have you been independent before? Is that something?

[00:26:53] Nicola Lindgren I haven't. That chapter was over. I didn't have I didn't have any insight on that. Sorry.

[00:26:57] Vernon Richards I mean, look, you can nap in the office if you wish. It just might be the last nap that you take in the office.

[00:27:04] Joe Colantonio I used to nap in my car, but people would knock on it, try to wake me up. I was totally not. I should my mellow. So not optimal.

[00:27:11] Vernon Richards Your mistake was being too easy to fin, Joe. You should park your car a little bit you should have got in the car, drove a little bit away and then had a nap and then driven back.

[00:27:21] Joe Colantonio That sound true. All right. I never want to be a manager. I always want to be an automation engineer my whole career. Maybe that kind of impacted my career in some way. But say I want to leave the software testing field. I know you have Chapter 9. Any quick hits for people that think I'm like, I love testing, but maybe I do want to test the waters somewhere else. Is there a way they could do without completely severing ties with testing?

[00:27:46] Nicola Lindgren A trend we saw with people that interviewed for this chapter is that they did it at the company they were already in, and I would notice that they wouldn't just do that straight away. It could just be a tester one day and start doing something else another. They kind of transition in that direction. So talking about it with your manager and saying, I love this company, but I would like to try something else and setting a timeframe around that, saying, maybe I could spend a few days doing this, maybe I could shadow someone else. And that's I think is one way you can go about it. I remember at a previous company I was at, someone became a front end developer and it was over time, their responsibility was actually initially they just had extra responsibilities. They still had this the daily test job and that responsibilities. And then at some point they did. They were replaced in team as they decided to full time be a developer. They had talk about that. I would say talk about that with your manager because maybe there are opportunities that your manager aware of that you might not know of yet. And the second thing is, assuming that I'm going to assume if you're hot, if you're valued and they want to keep you and they see a need for this role that you'd like to start trying out, then it could be a win win situation for both.

[00:29:02] Joe Colantonio That's great advice. I know I worked for a large company. A lot of times they had projects that you could start and people could like manage the projects and you kind of get a feel for if you want to be a manager, that's a good way to really up your management game and get seen in front of people on a kind of a different role. That's great advice. Vernon, anything you recommend.

[00:29:19] Nicola Lindgren It's less of a recommendation, it's more of a rallying cry or trying to get people to realize that in their position as a tester, maybe you're the testing specialist in your team or whatever, Is that because of where you are in your role, you have the opportunity to build up a lot of transferable skills by a ton because you have to communicate with people within your team and potentially outside of your team about the work you're doing and the impact it's having. Maybe it's a business impact, maybe it's a technology impacts, maybe it's impacting other adjacent teams and things like that. There's the technology stack that you have to understand. And so on and so on and so on. And so there are so many transferable skills. If you wanted to, you could take this in any direction that you like. I know that to me, anyway, it feels like a more typical path that people take from testing is to go into development or into product. But frankly, they could go in any direction that they wish. I believe I've seen people go from testing to SRE to developer to product and go all the way up the food chain in any one of those kind of directions. Yeah, definitely it gives you such a good perspective that you can do anything. The challenges and this is where that theme that Nicola talks about is important, is that there is a perception that testers sometimes lack certain skills, which is why if you can take the opportunity to move roles within your company, you've already built up that credibility and that reputation with people that matter. And it's a safer the stakes are not the same because these people know you. And so you'll have more leeway and more support potentially than if you did it with a new company. I think that advice to seek those opportunities out within your company, if you can make that happen, I think that's super duper wise. But I think if you go back the networking rears its head again. If you can network with people and demonstrate that you have the enthusiasm and the determination and the wherewithal to make that work, and you can definitely leverage that with some networking in a different company.

[00:31:21] Joe Colantonio Now, I love the concept of transferable skills, I think a lot of people never take an inventory of all the skills they actually have and how they can apply everywhere. They kind of boxed themselves in.

[00:31:30] Vernon Richards Yeah.

[00:31:31] Joe Colantonio We're all going, Wait a minute, I have this. I could be in this, this and this. These skills are the same. They're just in a different kind of flavor in this other role.

[00:31:40] Vernon Richards 100% and that's why I want to help broaden people's thinking. What is possible?

[00:31:46] Joe Colantonio Love it. All right. And you have a bonus chapter called Public Speak and actually started this podcast almost 11 years ago to help my public speaking because I was terrified of it. I'm still doing it. So why public speaking, Nicola, any thoughts?

[00:31:59] Nicola Lindgren I would say we're probably all expected public speak in our role and informal settings and I would even say like just speaking in public, it could be retro updates, it could be a small presentation where maybe you went to a conference and you're presenting back. I think it's a skill that helps manage the opposite the way you're perceived. Like it's one thing to be to have great ideas and you want to bring into the team and you want to improve things, but you need to be able to bring people on board and be I feel an effective public speaker gives you the ability to do that. It's one thing to have great ideas, but then if no one wants to listen to you, if no one, if you can't communicate in a way that's clear enough to want people to listen, then your job will be harder. And then it also is a way to increase impact. We have a chapter on like on promotional stuff. And we do talk a bit about impact, but if you want to scale yourself, then you're probably going to at some point want to talk to a larger group of people. I thought it's good to share advice on how to go about doing that.

[00:33:04] Joe Colantonio Love it. Vernon, anything to add there?

[00:33:07] Vernon Richards Yeah, it's the meta skill of distilling the message to share with somebody else. When you're going to speak in public, you have to think about, Well, what is it I'm trying to convey? What do I want to be different for the people that are going to hear this message or read this message or whatever? And then you have to construct it in some way and put it together so you can deliver it and then you've got to practice it. And so all these meta skills that you don't even realize that you're building, you do that and then the next time, the next time you've got a demo of the product in a retro, you are chilling like you are absolutely relaxed the next time you've got a because you've presented this thing to 50 people, a 100 people, whatever. The next time you go for an interview and as a panel of three people, you are chilling. Last time I talked about this, I did this. I did this on Joe's podcast with however many quadrillion people on the thing. I'm totally relaxed, I'm chillin. And so I think that's the thing that people don't anticipate. It's not even about going and being invited to all the conferences. It's about upskilling and improving your communication. And that's the thing that makes the difference, almost irrespective of the context.

[00:34:15] Joe Colantonio Okay. Nicola and Vernon, before we go, is there one piece of actionable advice you can give to someone to help them with their software testing careers? And what's the best way to find contact you or get our hands on the software testers journey?

[00:34:25] Vernon Richards I got one for the advice I would really think carefully about what are the things that energize you or what are the things that just drain you? Because that's a signal. It's not the only signal, but that's a signal about which direction you should headed next. And so be mindful of that. Try and be aware of what gives you energy or what is the thing that you could do with zero encouragement, zero persuasion. You just thought, I can do that. You just boom, you're in. That could be a signal about where you could take your career, that's my own bit of advice.

[00:34:58] Nicola Lindgren I really, really like what Vernon said. I would twist it a little bit for my advice and think about what makes you so even special. So if you think about the skills you have, but then more importantly, think about the combination of skills you have and then work on like marketing that and these kind of things, I will give the energy. If you talk about, say, learning test automation, that is a skill that's in demand. Then you also have to think if you're not as interested in that to set yourself apart, you're probably going to want to think about the combination of, Hey baby, you're good at this relation, you've learned it, and you're also really good at talking to people and you're very likable. So you'd be a very effective glue person. Or maybe you're very good at understanding business. But think about that combination or what you really have to offer and focus from that.

[00:35:47] Joe Colantonio Love it. And I'll have a link to The Software Tester's Journey book down below along with all the socials for Nicola and Vernon. So you can really work on your networking skills as well. Thank you both for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

[00:35:57] Nicola Lindgren Thank you.

[00:35:58] Vernon Richards For having us on. Appreciate you, man.

[00:36:00] Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links of everything we value we covered in this episode. Head in over to testguild.com/a527. And if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in iTunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed with creating end-to-end, full-stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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[00:37:18] Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.