Back on the job market

I find myself back on the job market after a break up with Campaign Monitor. I didn’t successfully pass probation. It was a mutual thing and both sides of the discussion were adult about it. These aren’t easy conversations to have and it doesn’t serve any purpose to get angry and rage quit. I am a little sad to leave because I enjoyed the company and people but I wasn’t able to advocate for quality in a way that added the business value they needed from the role.

Depression and Job Hunting

When I was job hunting around 8-9 months ago, it took me well over 2 months to find a job and interviews with over 13 companies (blog). However in that situation I wasn’t in a rush and was willing to wait for something that looked like it would fit me well. The constant rejections were hard to deal with; especially when I had been experiencing a spell of imposter phenomenon and feeling like I was not good enough for anything. I also broke my ankle during these job hunting efforts which had a huge impact on my mental well being (blog).

My broken ankle contributed to a relapse of depression at the start of the year. Because of this I wasn’t able to give my 100% to the new job at Campaign Monitor and this negatively impacted the engineering’s team view of the Quality Coach role. Once your perception of value is seen in a non favorable light, it is very challenging to recover. You only get one shot at leaving a first impression and your reputation is built up on that. I didn’t do a great job when I started, then I tried a new team and a new process and saw some improvements. However there were still some doubts if this role was what the company needed and if it was the right fit for my skills. I went to a third team for the last 3 weeks but I feel like the decision had already been made by that point.

Keeping Track of Job Hunting

I used a spreadsheet in my previous job hunting efforts to help me keep track of where I was up to with every company;

spreadsheet of previous job hunting efforts

With this spreadsheet I noted the source of  the lead; I was relying on mostly LinkedIn and a technical recruiter from Opus. I noted down where I was up to in the interview process, excitement for the role (out of 5) and any follow up notes. I also noted the few companies who contact me after I had received a successful job offer.

Will I do the same thing this time? I’m not too sure. I’ve got the luxury of around 2-3 weeks for job hunting before the personal budget starts getting a little tight but it would be worth experimenting with the spreadsheet again this time.

What am I looking for in a new job?

This time round I have more confidence in my skills as a tester. Last time I wanted to quit testing and try something different (either Android Development or Product Manager). However now I know I love growing my reputation for being known as a passionate tester. In a few years time I’d love to be running my own company focusing on running workshops for technical testing and mobile apps (e.g. TDD and kotlin, Continuous Integration and iOS). I’m not there yet so I’m looking for a mobile app testing role while I work on workshops in my spare time.

I’d love to have a role with support for speaking at conferences. I’m speaking at Agile Australia on how to get more people involved with testing in a few weeks, Selenium Conf in India at the end of June on using robots for mobile app testing, CAST in Florida in August on stories in becoming a quality coach. I now have an anecdote where that didn’t work out for me so that should be an interesting talk.

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