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This document explores the concept of career pathways for Quality Assurance (QA) and provides examples of pathways that a QA practitioner could take as they progress in their career. While this document highlights common pathways, Bitwise Industries (BW) encourages employees to blaze their own trail, which may involve identifying team needs that do not currently have a name or role. This document aims to provide guidance for career growth but does not cover all possibilities. Ultimately, it is important to discuss career goals and aspirations with your manager and work together to set and achieve those goals.
Career Pathways are the steps someone takes in their career to progress from one role and responsibility level to another. Describing career growth via pathways is helpful because it gives us concrete actions that an individual can follow to reach the next rung in their department’s career ladder or to transition to a role on a different team. When discussing pathways, we will focus on 4 pillars of growth: Training, Experience, Skills, and Specializations. Each of these categories is explained in the following sections.
Training is process in which we dedicate time and focus to learn skills and develop core technical and business competencies. We often like to compare BW to a learning hospital in that we’re building skills and continuously learning while performing the job. Continuous learning is a key aspect of the culture at Bitwise and we make it a point to encourage employees to go outside of their comfort zone and not be afraid of failure.
Continuous learning can be broken down into three categories:
Formal Learning
Formal learning includes initiatives that have been pre-determined, organized, and implemented for a specific learning purpose. This includes training programs within the organization, external workshops and conferences, and e-learning courses.
Social Learning
Social learning includes all of the ways a learner interacts, discusses, collaborates, and learns from others. Examples include coaching and mentoring, code reviews, Bitwise Connect talks, and blog posts.
Self-directed Learning
Self-directed learning is initiated and guided by the individual to learn a new skill or improve their knowledge and understanding. Self-directed learning can include researching and reading to gain a deep understanding of a topic, listening to relevant podcasts or watching instructional videos, and performing experimentation and exploration.
Over the coming months, BW will be implementing training tools and developing curriculums to provide better and more strategic continuous learning experience. The Developer Experience team plans to expand our offerings in formal learning, social learning, and self-directed learning.
Experience is our opportunity to apply the training we’ve received. Every day you are gaining experience in many ways, such as contributing to a project, meeting with a client, or troubleshooting a bug. Both successes and failures on projects will develop valuable lessons and experience which will aid you in future projects.