QA Analyst Challenge part 2
- 4 minsKeep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it
Now that we are in the throw of things and you have shown interest in landing a job as a qa analyst, lets continue building out your online brand. Employers find that people who showcase their talent or take their skills to another level are more likely to land a job. Your online presence when someone searches your name can make or break your role in the IT industry. It is hard for an employer to see how interested you are if they do a google search of your name and your instagram or facebook pages show up with you on vacation or possibly doing things that the employer might frown upon. A great way to take control of that is to create a blog and a website to control what you want people to see and understand about your next career move. This next step will consist of you creating a personal blog and updating your github profile to show of some metrics that will build over time. These steps should help complete the first phase of your new career move.
Creating a website and getting your own domain may take you some time or create confusion, but I can help you along the way.
Github pages
This webpage that you are reading this from is an example of my blog (which I try to update on a monthly basis). I purchased a domain so that the blog links to meralus.com but you dont need to spend a penny to do this. Here are the next steps on how to create a free github website
Github pages allows you to host this website for free on your github profile. Adding blog entries to this (which we will go over in the future) will show that you know how to communicate correctly with github. During this process you will be learning how to push and pull updates from github and see changes made through updates in github. Being part of a QA analyst involves understanding how code gets pushed, pulled, and scanned through git and other mediums so this is great practice for learning git and Github. This will also help with branching out into other areas of IT in the future.
Here are free Jekyll Based Github Pages themes you can use (like I did) to build out a creative blogging profile.
Git vs Github and its importance
I mentioned git and github as two different things. To explain that further you can read my blog post about the difference between the two and how to understand it. Git vs Github
In reading that blog post Im hoping to clear confusion about the two. If you are confused feel free to message me so I can explain further. If you are not confused and think I did a great job (feel free to let me know) carry on with these next steps.
Talk the talk, walk the walk, blog the blog
Once you are done creating the github pages and are ready to write your first blog post I can help you with the blog post idea that relates to QA software testing and possibly get it posted on Linux Journal like me.
I will again stress the importance of building an online presence again because your are coming from a field that is not related to the IT industry at all. It makes it very difficult or a recruiter or employer to take a chance at giving you a job. With your initiative and getting this far with my steps already your showing me that you are interested and putting in some of the work. These are just some of the stepping stones. Once we have a blog post up you can share that on linkedin which will boost your chances more and prove your skills in QA/IT related things all together. These changes and updates that youll be putting on github can be shown with a github profile which will change and update on its own once you setup a github profile.
Github Profiles
Here is your next step in creating a github profile
You will need to follow those steps to create the page. Once your comfortable and familiar with that you can use the Github metrics page to tweak your profile.
This will conclude Phase 1 of the QA Challenge. These steps here can be cumbersome and confusing. If you need help feel free to reach out to me to assist with setting up your environment or working out fixing issues with your blog or profile.
Next Steps
Once these things are complete you will need to send me links to both your blog page and profile with a text or email stating “ I have built an online presence, now i’m ready for phase 2 of the QA challenge!”
Phase 2 will be where we get you started on finding the proper study material, getting a certificate to validate your skills and step into phase 3, the job hunting phase. If you have made it this far i’m proud of you and will be excited when I get your ready for phase 2 message.