You've been pondering a career change for quite some time? You've considered switching to the prosperous field of IT but fear that it's too complicated, time-consuming, difficult or don't have the necessary credentials or academic studies?

What if I told you there is an entryway with a set of skills that are easy to gain, the meantime to getting a job and paid is very low compared to starting as a developer and it requires no higher education degrees or certifications?

This particular entryway is called manual testing and it's much simpler because it involves using software, not creating it.

But what is manual testing? Manual testing is part of a broader section of software development called software testing, which is concerned with assuring the quality of the software that is going to be used by, in many cases, millions of people and it does that by implementing automated or manual checks that, simply put, test that the software is behaving as expected, testing is all the more crucial in life or death situations such as air traffic control or medical equipment.

Manual testing is the part of this process in which, well, you manually test the software. Think of game testers, for example, which is also a form of manual testing, they get the game and play it, with the caveat that they are paid to look for and document the bugs that they encounter while playing it. Manual testing is not much more different than that, of course, the actual day-to-day tasks are different from company to company and software to software, but they all involve following a predefined process to use the company's software and document your findings in various ways.

This is of course, an oversimplified overview of the subject but the main takeaway of the article is that there are ways and particularly this simple way, which won't take up all of your free time and will probably yield results faster than anything else you've tried and won't make you feel overwhelmed.

There are tons of resources on how to get started as a manual tester out there so I encourage you to find the one that's most suitable for you. I also encourage you to take a look at my course on the subject, as many people have found it easy to go through and understand, it's very compact yet delivers a very big percentage of the notions you're going to need if you want to go forward on this path. It's also just the first in a series of courses in which I will go more in-depth on this topic and where to go from there on depending on your ambition. Check it out on Udemy

Why should you listen to me? I'm a senior quality assurance engineer, I've worked with big corporations in the fields of aviation, gaming and medical technology and I recently started to share my knowledge on the subject with the internet. It's my ambition to hear that many of my students get a job after taking my courses, I'm hoping to hear from many of you with feedback on what I can improve on and how can I help you move forward!