Today’s employers are, quite simply, looking for people who can bring multiple skills to the table and add versatility to existing teams as they seek to maintain primary, secondary and tertiary skills in their people. Indeed, gone are the days when we could specialise in one area and make a life-long career of it. No, it just doesn’t wash anymore, and as technologies and methods develop and become mainstream then the skills gaps and general employability of those not moving with the times will face an increasing risk. So, if we are to progress and keep our skills up to date we need to look at the gap in the marketplace and decide on the appropriate training to keep us into the mix.
Let’s look at some possible hybrid roles and a blend of skills that would fit the bill of each, depending on specific roles and requirements within the team structure:
Whilst there are many different hybrid roles and near limitless skills combinations, the two above are reasonably representative of roles that are growing and where skills shortages are considered endemic. The skills shown are representative of the specialism and provide a possible route for getting there. However, it is likely that the skills that get you to your hybrid specialism will still draw on your earlier skills as employers seek continuity of resource and flexibility within roles.
The hybrid role you adopt is, quite clearly, your choice, and yours alone. To help make that choice, we’ve given a light overview of each of the seven pillars and the skills they give as you work your way to your chosen hybrid role as an ‘IT Specialist’
Software Testing Training Courses
Software testing is about making sure that the applications we develop and deliver demonstrably meet the requirements of users and underpin the business as intended. Of course, how this is achieved depends upon many things, not least your software testing training, experience of your test team and test maturity of your organisation.
Too often, software testing is regarded as a post-build activity, but if things going into the build are not verified as meeting the requirements and acceptance criteria it is likely the software won’t work as intended, and time will have been lost and money wasted. Pre-build testing is where it is cheapest to fix things – before they are built into code and become expensive and time-consuming to fix.
If you plan to build a career in software testing, then you will benefit from the comprehensive list of software testing courses offered by TSG Training. These include 10 practical software testing courses ranging from an Introduction through to Practical Tet Management, and internationally certificated programmes and accredited courses from ISTQB and iSQI:
• ISTQB Foundation level and ISTQB Foundation Agile Extension software testing courses to get you started
• A full programme of the ISTQB CTAL Advanced software testing courses aligned to roles, including Test Analyst, Technical Test Analyst, Test Manager, Security Tester and Test Automation Engineer to advance you and your career
• iSQI software testing course certification programme aligned to subjects, such as the Certified Agile Tester course, Certified Mobile App Tester course and apps and Selenium Foundation course.
Both the ISTQB and iSQI software testing certification programmes are internationally accepted as the De Facto standard for employers and by individuals for career growth. Whatever your skills level or experience, TSGs software testing training programme will increase your skills and value to your organisation.
The software tester might also consider a Business Analysis Foundation or requirements elicitation course.
Programming Training Courses
If your Business Analysts and test leads have done their bit by getting you firm requirements and acceptance criteria that define the needs of the business and success, then programming solutions and unit testing should be a breeze for you – and fun!
However, as new methods of delivery become ever more popular and myriad developments in programming take place to support them, we are faced with the choice of selecting the right programming language for your technology – and which you choose will be key to success and your own career development.
To help give you the skills you need, we’ve developed new programming training courses in the following areas:
• CSS
• Database Administration
• HTML
• JAVA
• MariaDB
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• SQL
• Web Development
But as a developer, have you also considered taking some basic business analysis and software testing courses? As well as Test Analysts and Business Analysts, programmers and development times and accuracy have all benefited from being able to talk the same language as use processes that will underpin unit testing. Try the ISTQB Foundation level course – you can take or leave the exam, but the course will be of direct benefit to you as a developer.
Agile & DevOps Training Courses
Agile and DevOps are now mainstream methods for developing and implementing new and modified systems. Indeed, their uptake has been so prolific that they are now starting to dominate the profession.
As can be expected, the advent of new methods will always bring about an increasing need for new skills. Equally important, however, is that we learn and use new skills to build on existing skills to support new methods, thereby helping us to become ‘multi-skilled’ and, consequently, more valuable to our organisation and our own step-up the career ladder of.
To help you acquire the new skills you need to be valuable in the Agile and DevOps arenas, we have developed and now offer Agile Training and DevOps Training:
• A DevOps Foundation Course
• An Introduction to Agile Testing Course
• The iSQI Certified Agile Tester Course
• The iSQI Scrum Master Pro course and certificate
• An Agile for Product Owners course and certificate
• The BCS Systems Development Essentials Using Agile course.
These Agile training courses and DevOps Foundation training course provide a well-rounded approach and deeper level of understanding for the new methods for all roles. Of course, the programming section offers more if you are looking for training courses that are more technical in nature and content.
Business Analysis & Change Management Training Courses
Business Analysis represents the starting point of all programmes, projects and applications that provide systems solutions to business problems. Without good Business Analysis we would have no point of reference to say what is required or know when we have achieved it! Seldom operated in isolation, Software Testing and Business Analysis form the core of what’s needed to deliver complete solutions that the business both wants and can use to underpin its processes. Essentially, the Business Analyst will produce a set of requirements and the test expert will make sure that they are ‘testable’. These two skills are becoming more popular to hold as individuals seek to become multi-skilled to support both Agile and DevOps methods of application delivery
A big category, the Business Analysis section is split into three categories aligned to skill levels, addressing:
• BCS Certified Foundation Training courses for Business Analysis, Change and Commercial Awareness
• BCS Certified Practitioner Training courses for Benefits Management and Business Acceptance, Data Management Essentials, Modelling Business Processes, Requirements Engineering, and Solutions and Enterprise Architecture
• BCS Certified Professional training courses for more advanced subjects
Additional courses are offered to provide Foundation level certifications and include courses to multi-skill individuals through:
• BCS Certified Foundation in IS Project Management course
• BCS Certified Foundation in Systems Development course
• BCS Certified Modelling Techniques course
All the courses in this section are accredited by the British Computer Society (BCS) and form part of its Chartered IT Professional diploma/qualification.
Tools Training Courses
Tools have become an everyday part of what we do, particularly if we consider people, processes and tools as the three key ingredients to successful systems development and delivery. Tools are varied and many, but in the context of systems delivery, programming tools and software testing tools provide us with significant value. They can drive our development process, catalogue all our test scripts, undertake automated testing on average in 5% of the time it takes to do the same test manually, test the performance, resilience and capacity of our systems to predict a point in time at which they might break – which may be now!
In this section, we look at tools courses to support usage of the major paid and shareware tools, the latter now increasingly accepted as mainstream. These include:
• Test management courses
• Test automation training courses
• Performance testing training courses
• Behavioural driven development courses using Visual Studio, SpecFlow and WebDriver C# and Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium C# with .Net training courses
• Selenium C# with JavaScript courses
Whatever tool you use, the right tools training course will provide the platform you need to get going and on to becoming an expert in the field.
ITIL® Service Management
An ever-popular field, for years IT Service Management practices and approaches such as ITIL® have provided IT Organizations with best practice guidance on how to structure their capabilities to best support the needs of the business. As enabling technologies such as Cloud emerge and business demand increases, there has been a noticeable shift in how IT Organizations provision their services. Digital Transformation is driving the increasing relevance of Agile & Lean approaches with DevOps, VeriSM™ and ITIL® 4 all integrating these principles into their core to enable IT to better meet the needs of the business.
Essentially, ITIL® Service Management and its related disciplines are used to implement, support and measure your production systems and include subject matter on:
• The Information Technology Information Library (ITIL® V4);
• Service Desk Management;
• Supporting frameworks, such as DevOps, Software Asset management, VeriSM, COBIT, Business Relationship Management, Agile Service Manager and many others.
Test Automation Training Courses
Test Automation has increased in uptake significant in recent years on three different fronts:
• The adoption of agile and its usage of automated regression packs
• The amount of testing that can be run post-implementation for major systems
• The potential return on investment available from automated testing on large and complex systems.
In this section, we span practical usage of automation, certification and a mix of the two. On the introductory side of things, we offer courses both for Automated testing and Performance testing. On the certification side of things, we offer the ISTQB Advanced Test Automation Engineer course and the highly interactive iSQI Selenium WebDriver Foundation course.
It is now industry-accepted that automated regression and performance testing are key to success on many fronts, not least:
• The ability to maintain and use high-coverage test packs in around 5% of the time it would to execute the same tests manually;
• The ability to determine the performance, resilience and capacity of an application being implemented for the first time or modified.
Whichever way we look at things, automation is key to efficiency in time, coverage, and cost of testing. More than that, tools to manage automated testing and performance also provide significant levels of confidence about an application and inform decision-making. However, they are complex, and users find they benefit from a tools training course that is specific to their chosen product.
All done?
We hope we have given you a brief overview of some of the skills that are needed in today’s marketplace and the importance of having two or more to bring to the table. However, if you didn’t find what you want the please call us of get in touch at enquiries@tsg-training.co.uk .
Let’s look at some possible hybrid roles and a blend of skills that would fit the bill of each, depending on specific roles and requirements within the team structure:
Whilst there are many different hybrid roles and near limitless skills combinations, the two above are reasonably representative of roles that are growing and where skills shortages are considered endemic. The skills shown are representative of the specialism and provide a possible route for getting there. However, it is likely that the skills that get you to your hybrid specialism will still draw on your earlier skills as employers seek continuity of resource and flexibility within roles.
The hybrid role you adopt is, quite clearly, your choice, and yours alone. To help make that choice, we’ve given a light overview of each of the seven pillars and the skills they give as you work your way to your chosen hybrid role as an ‘IT Specialist’
Software Testing Training Courses
Software testing is about making sure that the applications we develop and deliver demonstrably meet the requirements of users and underpin the business as intended. Of course, how this is achieved depends upon many things, not least your software testing training, experience of your test team and test maturity of your organisation.
Too often, software testing is regarded as a post-build activity, but if things going into the build are not verified as meeting the requirements and acceptance criteria it is likely the software won’t work as intended, and time will have been lost and money wasted. Pre-build testing is where it is cheapest to fix things – before they are built into code and become expensive and time-consuming to fix.
If you plan to build a career in software testing, then you will benefit from the comprehensive list of software testing courses offered by TSG Training. These include 10 practical software testing courses ranging from an Introduction through to Practical Tet Management, and internationally certificated programmes and accredited courses from ISTQB and iSQI:
• ISTQB Foundation level and ISTQB Foundation Agile Extension software testing courses to get you started
• A full programme of the ISTQB CTAL Advanced software testing courses aligned to roles, including Test Analyst, Technical Test Analyst, Test Manager, Security Tester and Test Automation Engineer to advance you and your career
• iSQI software testing course certification programme aligned to subjects, such as the Certified Agile Tester course, Certified Mobile App Tester course and apps and Selenium Foundation course.
Both the ISTQB and iSQI software testing certification programmes are internationally accepted as the De Facto standard for employers and by individuals for career growth. Whatever your skills level or experience, TSGs software testing training programme will increase your skills and value to your organisation.
The software tester might also consider a Business Analysis Foundation or requirements elicitation course.
Programming Training Courses
If your Business Analysts and test leads have done their bit by getting you firm requirements and acceptance criteria that define the needs of the business and success, then programming solutions and unit testing should be a breeze for you – and fun!
However, as new methods of delivery become ever more popular and myriad developments in programming take place to support them, we are faced with the choice of selecting the right programming language for your technology – and which you choose will be key to success and your own career development.
To help give you the skills you need, we’ve developed new programming training courses in the following areas:
• CSS
• Database Administration
• HTML
• JAVA
• MariaDB
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• SQL
• Web Development
But as a developer, have you also considered taking some basic business analysis and software testing courses? As well as Test Analysts and Business Analysts, programmers and development times and accuracy have all benefited from being able to talk the same language as use processes that will underpin unit testing. Try the ISTQB Foundation level course – you can take or leave the exam, but the course will be of direct benefit to you as a developer.
Agile & DevOps Training Courses
Agile and DevOps are now mainstream methods for developing and implementing new and modified systems. Indeed, their uptake has been so prolific that they are now starting to dominate the profession.
As can be expected, the advent of new methods will always bring about an increasing need for new skills. Equally important, however, is that we learn and use new skills to build on existing skills to support new methods, thereby helping us to become ‘multi-skilled’ and, consequently, more valuable to our organisation and our own step-up the career ladder of.
To help you acquire the new skills you need to be valuable in the Agile and DevOps arenas, we have developed and now offer Agile Training and DevOps Training:
• A DevOps Foundation Course
• An Introduction to Agile Testing Course
• The iSQI Certified Agile Tester Course
• The iSQI Scrum Master Pro course and certificate
• An Agile for Product Owners course and certificate
• The BCS Systems Development Essentials Using Agile course.
These Agile training courses and DevOps Foundation training course provide a well-rounded approach and deeper level of understanding for the new methods for all roles. Of course, the programming section offers more if you are looking for training courses that are more technical in nature and content.
Business Analysis & Change Management Training Courses
Business Analysis represents the starting point of all programmes, projects and applications that provide systems solutions to business problems. Without good Business Analysis we would have no point of reference to say what is required or know when we have achieved it! Seldom operated in isolation, Software Testing and Business Analysis form the core of what’s needed to deliver complete solutions that the business both wants and can use to underpin its processes. Essentially, the Business Analyst will produce a set of requirements and the test expert will make sure that they are ‘testable’. These two skills are becoming more popular to hold as individuals seek to become multi-skilled to support both Agile and DevOps methods of application delivery
A big category, the Business Analysis section is split into three categories aligned to skill levels, addressing:
• BCS Certified Foundation Training courses for Business Analysis, Change and Commercial Awareness
• BCS Certified Practitioner Training courses for Benefits Management and Business Acceptance, Data Management Essentials, Modelling Business Processes, Requirements Engineering, and Solutions and Enterprise Architecture
• BCS Certified Professional training courses for more advanced subjects
Additional courses are offered to provide Foundation level certifications and include courses to multi-skill individuals through:
• BCS Certified Foundation in IS Project Management course
• BCS Certified Foundation in Systems Development course
• BCS Certified Modelling Techniques course
All the courses in this section are accredited by the British Computer Society (BCS) and form part of its Chartered IT Professional diploma/qualification.
Tools Training Courses
Tools have become an everyday part of what we do, particularly if we consider people, processes and tools as the three key ingredients to successful systems development and delivery. Tools are varied and many, but in the context of systems delivery, programming tools and software testing tools provide us with significant value. They can drive our development process, catalogue all our test scripts, undertake automated testing on average in 5% of the time it takes to do the same test manually, test the performance, resilience and capacity of our systems to predict a point in time at which they might break – which may be now!
In this section, we look at tools courses to support usage of the major paid and shareware tools, the latter now increasingly accepted as mainstream. These include:
• Test management courses
• Test automation training courses
• Performance testing training courses
• Behavioural driven development courses using Visual Studio, SpecFlow and WebDriver C# and Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium C# with .Net training courses
• Selenium C# with JavaScript courses
Whatever tool you use, the right tools training course will provide the platform you need to get going and on to becoming an expert in the field.
ITIL® Service Management
An ever-popular field, for years IT Service Management practices and approaches such as ITIL® have provided IT Organizations with best practice guidance on how to structure their capabilities to best support the needs of the business. As enabling technologies such as Cloud emerge and business demand increases, there has been a noticeable shift in how IT Organizations provision their services. Digital Transformation is driving the increasing relevance of Agile & Lean approaches with DevOps, VeriSM™ and ITIL® 4 all integrating these principles into their core to enable IT to better meet the needs of the business.
Essentially, ITIL® Service Management and its related disciplines are used to implement, support and measure your production systems and include subject matter on:
• The Information Technology Information Library (ITIL® V4);
• Service Desk Management;
• Supporting frameworks, such as DevOps, Software Asset management, VeriSM, COBIT, Business Relationship Management, Agile Service Manager and many others.
Test Automation Training Courses
Test Automation has increased in uptake significant in recent years on three different fronts:
• The adoption of agile and its usage of automated regression packs
• The amount of testing that can be run post-implementation for major systems
• The potential return on investment available from automated testing on large and complex systems.
In this section, we span practical usage of automation, certification and a mix of the two. On the introductory side of things, we offer courses both for Automated testing and Performance testing. On the certification side of things, we offer the ISTQB Advanced Test Automation Engineer course and the highly interactive iSQI Selenium WebDriver Foundation course.
It is now industry-accepted that automated regression and performance testing are key to success on many fronts, not least:
• The ability to maintain and use high-coverage test packs in around 5% of the time it would to execute the same tests manually;
• The ability to determine the performance, resilience and capacity of an application being implemented for the first time or modified.
Whichever way we look at things, automation is key to efficiency in time, coverage, and cost of testing. More than that, tools to manage automated testing and performance also provide significant levels of confidence about an application and inform decision-making. However, they are complex, and users find they benefit from a tools training course that is specific to their chosen product.
All done?
We hope we have given you a brief overview of some of the skills that are needed in today’s marketplace and the importance of having two or more to bring to the table. However, if you didn’t find what you want the please call us of get in touch at enquiries@tsg-training.co.uk .
