When a few months back, I took a decision to take the next step in my career, I was just stuck in options, suggestions and opinions. Almost for everything there were mixed views from the people whom I consulted. So, I thought that I will take the situation in my hand and then take a decision. After giving a clear thought, I came to the following conclusions -1. Quality and the kind of work will be my first consideration.
2. If the above holds true, there will be no reason that the organization will not pay me well :-).
3. I will prefer a hybrid approach for the nature of work. I owe this terminology to search engine algorithms for web crawling. Now what this means is that some people look for a depth-wise (domain-specific) approach for career, not caring about what other things are happening in the industry. They happen to be people in COEs in the long run. Some choose for breadth-wise approach, touching multiple domains and are not really concerned to cover decent knowledge in any particular domain. They happen to be good Project Managers, thereby managing multiple projects in multiple domains successfully.
Finally, for this career step, I chose for a hybrid approach – breadth-wise career steps, while covering decent depth in the time frame available. I have tried that so far, with immense satisfaction and success.
Having already spent good enough time in Manual and Automated Functional Testing, in Physical Data Model Validation for Mainframes and then in Performance Testing and Engineering for multiple domains and technologies, it’s time that I should have a taste of white-box and security testing, in combination with performance testing. Added to this, when the role demands knowledge of Unix and Perl, this is one of the most encouraging and challenging role I could target. So, as of now, this career move seems quite exciting to me!
Many of us might be in this dilemma while taking our career moves, so I would like to hear from people, who happen to read this blog entry, about their opinion about breadth-wise, depth-wise and hybrid approaches.
Rahul Verma.