Recruiting Test Automation talent vs Upskilling existing talent

Problem statement:

In IT organizations or Software Engineering units of corporate organizations, a question seldom strikes the mind of leadership, whether they recruit a test automation talent from the labour market or make internal arrangements to upskill their existing talent pool to fill up any open positions in their projects. 

It’s not an easy decision to make, since hiring process for both permanent or contractual talent could take up significant time, jeopardising the project needs and schedule. The recruitment process will involve creating an open position, advertising the job, collecting, and filtering the resumes that best matches the job criteria, identifying an able interview panel to conduct the technical evaluation (sometimes, it is outsourced to consultancies), scheduling managerial rounds, negotiating notice period and salary as per fitment, making an offer, offer acceptance, onboarding etc. Filling the position from an existing vendor organization may reduce the lead time, but it will increase OPEX, and provide less degree of freedom on that resource’s performance management and over time it will establish dependency. More often vendor organizations are unable to source an automation resource ticking all boxes of the skill and experience requirements for the job.

Over past few years, many organizations conducted inhouse upskilling programs to migrate all manual testers/quality assurance professionals to test automation skill sets. Some did partnerships with external training providers to design a customised training plan suiting their organizational strategy and resourcing forecasts for upcoming years. They did lots of investments in their learning and certification budget apart from investing time, but still they find that many of the upskilled resources are not able to fulfil the promise when they are deployed into challenging projects, most of which are following Agile lifecycles.

So, what's common among these options, is identifying the right talent for the job.

Recommended Solutions:

ü Recruiting a candidate from job market:

All recruitment decisions originate from the organization strategy to support the organizational vision. For example, if the vision is “delivering IT projects on or before the end date, within budget, meeting all quality standards”, then recruiting the people with right skills and experiences must be part of their strategy, as they may not be interested investing time in training, which would increase their CAPEX and OPEX, and not help much in achieving their vision on short term. However, if the vision is for long term, and the mission is to earn recognition of say to be in the list of top 10 employers, then investing in training would be required.

 

As every project undertaken, have an impact on the organization’s profitability, vision and mission, any recruitment for the open position in the project should be taken seriously.

1.     Clearly draft the job description (JD) - elaborate on the job roles and responsibilities, the specific test automation skills and relevant experiences that are expected out of a candidate. Always involve the projects Technical Architect, Delivery Lead, Project Manager Test Manager/Architect in the JD drafting and review process. If the role going to be crucial, it’s advisable to mandate having some specialised professional certifications on certain skills/technologies. Example, if the project requires an Automation Architect/Automation Lead/Automation Manager, then "ISTQB certified Automation Engineer" certification could be mandated. This will ensure that the candidate is having professional knowledge on test automation principle and practices. Optionally include any programming language certification in Java, JavaScript or Python that will ensure the candidate has good coding background.

2.     Structure the selection process in 4 stages: Every organization have different recruiting process. My recommendation is a 4-stage process:

a.     Assign technical people to screen resumes.

b.     Online screening: max 7 multiple choice questions on test automation and related technologies, plus couple of small programming puzzles to solve.

c.     Technical Round: wrap up within 90 minutes, focus on the technical challenges, debugging skills and innovation that the candidate has carried out, his contribution towards the automation optimization and its impact on ROI. Consider any contribution to Git-Hub or any other opensource platforms, any publications on test automation journals/blogs. Most importantly, asses the candidates’ level of passion for automation, coding, problem solving and learning.

d.     Managerial Round: max 30 mins, understanding their motivation, whether its financial rewards, achieving a certain designation or getting wider recognition. Their capability to perform under tight timelines balancing their stress, ability to work as a team player. 

Most importantly, carefully deal with those who are not passionate and self-motivated towards automation. They may not be a good fit in the long run.

ü Upskilling existing workforce:

This is an excellent idea, for sustainability, earning reputation, balancing geo-political impacts, and display commitments towards people development. Since, upskilling involves both CAPEX and OPEX, organizations should:

1.     Start by gathering statistics on the skills their customers and clients are looking for, the ones that their competitors are using. In terms of test automation skills, the tools are aligned with the layers of testing. Like, UI Automation using specific tools and languages (i.e., playwright, cypress, webdriverio, selenium with JavaScript/Java/Python, robot-framework, Copado, Provar, AccelQ, UFT, Test Complete, TOSCA, RFT etc.), API Automation (i.e., ReadyApi, RestAssured, Postman, SoapUI, Swagger, Pact, rest, soap, http/https, ftp, ssh, json, xml, GraphQL, Mulesoft, Kong, RIT, karate etc.), Mobility Automation (i.e. Appium, Perfecto, SeeTest etc.), Robotic Process Automation (RPA tools, i.e. Uipath, BluePrism, Robot Framework RPA etc.), Database Automation (i.e. using Java, JavaScript, Python etc.)

2.     Do a survey on existing testing talent pool, identify the sample populations, those are willing to upskill in test automation skills, and those are willing to upskill for a different job role that they wish to move to (example: Scurm Master, Business Analyst, PMO etc.). Upskilling all manual testers to automation without giving any choice, may not be the wise idea, and I personally believe this type of move never make much impact for the organization in the long term. Some people are phobic towards coding, as they are to Mathematics. No matter how simplified the coding materials are written, they won't develop much interest to learn and nurture it. These people may be more interested to upskill as such they could take up roles like:  Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Project Managers, Content Writer, Product Manager. So, Choosing the right candidates to upskill to automation skills is the key here.

3.     Next, develop training plans, schedule trainings, conduct trainings, gather feedbacks, and feed the inputs to revisit the the training plan. According to me, when developing training plan, beside the basics, advance concepts (like dynamic xpaths in case of Selenium, usage of Regular Expressions, JSON handling, executing DB queries from code etc) with practical case studies and programming tasks (both guided and un-guided) should be include. At the end of the training, it is advisable to conduct one online test (including programming) to ascertain that all participants have successfully met the training goals and objectives. Always identify actionable items on the feedbacks received on the training plan, material and the trainers. This will generate key performance indicators for the training program.