Mentorship is a career testers superpower!

Career progression in Testing can be hard, and navigating a successful career in testing is not straight forward. There are many occasions in your testing career where you will be challenged by situations that you have not faced before. Organisations have drivers and objectives that mean we are subject to constant change in how we work and what we do. This creates uncertainty in our careers. Not all of these are difficulties are technical, there can be challenges with company culture, new development approaches, difficult stakeholders, politics and developing new relationships, to name a few. When you need to move into a new role or join a new company, you need to perform and you often need to quickly acquire new skills and competencies to help you thrive! You don’t need to do this alone, mentorship is a powerful way of gaining support and advice from an experienced guide, who will help you grow and reach your goals and potential. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But many testers struggle to know when and how to find a mentor and how to reap the benefits of such a unique relationship. In this talk Mike will use the 4 W’s (When, What Why, Who) of mentoring to explain to the QA&Test audience how to find and use a mentor to help supercharge their careers. Based on his personal experience of having been both a mentee and a mentor, Mike will share the benefits of having a mentor, and how this has helped shape his career to date. Mike will also share a case study of how a mentor helped a Software Test Manager transition into a SME and Product Owner on a Quality Engineering transformation programme, to ensure there is a practical example of mentoring that brings the theory to life!