One of the awesome testers in Moolya recently thought;
Within my team I am considered to be an awesome tester but outside of my team nobody knows about it. I am just ordinary and that is not truly who I am.
This is not a case in isolation but the state of this awesome tester is what is applicable to a lot of employees in a lot of companies. However, there are specific pointers for earning your reputation outside of your team and having been there done that on an international scale, I am sharing the same for people not just within Moolya but also outside of it.
Before that, I want to write a personal line to that tester in Moolya.
Dear Awesome Moolyan, don’t think to the scale of being recognised within Moolya because as a Moolyan we want you to be recognised by the world and we want to be bragging that you still choose to work with us.
Pointers to earn your reputation at a global scale
Applies across any profession
- Don’t work for recognition or reputation. Your work has to bring that to you.
- Share your work with lots of people. Your mission is to make people smarter than you.
- Money can make you think small. Creating value can make you think large.
- You have to go beyond yourselves. Your definition of “you” is usually very small.
- Create structures for people to learn what you learnt, faster.
- Caring for someone else’s learning is what makes them think you are beyond yourselves.
- Your weekend is your biggest source of meeting new people or people within your organisation you want to share you learning. Don’t under estimate the power of weekend.
- Reinvest your money. Why do you think entrepreneurs turn to investors? They know, reinvesting their money is the only way to grow. Grow, not just money, but the value they have built.
Applies specific to testing profession
- Coach testers who want to be awesome if you think you are awesome.
- Create your own Weekend Testing chapter and or participate in the on going ones across the globe.
- Test open source software. Stop being that, “I will only work on things that will bring me money”.
- Publish your test reports. Strip off all confidentiality and publish reports.
- Share your mistakes publicly. Every tester goes through a common set of mistakes in their life. This world would be a better place if everyone shared what they did and the new comers could just bypass it.
- Disrupt your own testing. Ask yourselves, “Why am I doing what I did yesterday?” and come up with something new and again share what you found out by that. You would discover that it is hard to disrupt your own testing.
- Go seeking people who can prove you wrong. For instance if you think you are an expert in manual testing (oh sure, you don’t want to be a frog in the well) so go find people who can help you break the assumption.
- Reinvest some of the money you earn to learning, buying and reading books, attending conferences, attending training and setting up a meet up of the kind of people who can challenge you.
Build a vision for yourselves, Not the next high paying job.
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