Kindly sponsored by Software Testing Europe.
We recently surveyed the Software Testing Community on their education. This is the result. Click for larger size.
An update in response to some questions by James Bach.
- Q: What counts as a certification? A: In reference to the ‘How many testers hold a certification’ area of the infographic. This relates to software testing certifications such as ISEB and ISQTB. In the survey, people were asked “Do you hold a recognised software testing certificate? E.g. ISEB or ISQTB”.
- Q: What’s a professional qualification? A: Perhaps this could have been made a bit clearer. But in the context of the survey, (I believe) it relates to qualifications that don’t quite add up to a degree. Diplomas for example (in the UK) are often achieve in much less time than degrees.
- Q: Why is schooling confused with education? A: I’m not sure it is and perhaps some clarification would be required. We tried as best as possible to ask people about their education and did include ‘self education’ as part of the survey. Are there areas we missed? We would be interested to know as we would very much like to build upon this and improve future surveys.
For reference, here is the survey we asked testers to fill out.
Really nice. I would like to see something like that regarding the areas that are being focused, like automation with selenium, or performance testing… etc
Glad you like it
We have plans to do others. With your suggestion, do you mean what tools are people using for automation? Am sure there will be other questions in relation to automation to ask too.
Interesting. Good thing to know.
Here are some extra things that would be good to have in the report:
- number of Test managers/ Expert Testers, Senior Testers, Junior Testers
- programming and scripting languages
- %of the time(month or project) the tester writes code (to help him test)
- specializations (exploratory testing, manual testing – BB and WB testing; automated functional testing, performance testing, usability testing, security testing, etc)
Interesting results. However, I wish there was another chart about how many actually had a degree in a technical field like CS, CPE, MIS, before becoming a tester. That’s a statistic I think would be more interesting than just simply what degree level of highest accomplishment do you hold.
Kind of a limited sample size (and self-selected), but interesting nonetheless. I’m most surprised by the stats on certification. While overall it’s about 50/50, more than half of those who are certified are in Europe. Why’s certification so big in Europe, I wonder?
Thanks Rosie! Interesting mix of results.
Very nice looking! I hope this gets expanded upon in the future with more data! I love me some infographics
Yo participé y realmente me pareció interesante el resultado…gracias!!
Nice survey! It is interesting that Undergraduate / Postgraduate ratio is 50/50. I wonder how many of the postgraduates are MA’s in Computer Science and how many are geology PhDs that switched careers due to peak oil?
Thanks Rosie! I shared the results with my testers as I believe it is a good start in understanding how testers learn. I too was surprised by the high number of tester certified and mostly in Europe. Do a high percentage of jobs in Europe require certification?
First of all. Thanks Rosie for the nice infograph.
A number of people have commented on the high level of certification for European testers. Being one of them I would like to comment on that.
First the number of respondents is relatively low, so I would not draw too big conclusions about it. Second many European testers work for consultant firms who supply testing services to clients. In the Netherlands almost all of these suppliers start test training by sending their (future) testers on a TMap Next or ISTQB training. The reason they do this is kind of a chicken and egg story. Suppliers claim the clients want it, and clients claim suppliers have convinced us that certification is necessary. So for many testers it is something that is a fact of life. If you start testing you are certified.
A more interesting question would be how many of them support the content of the certification and actually use it in practice as part of their work (and not as part of job applications).