Surviving to Leading: Owning Your Testing Career

Paul Gerrard

14:15 - 15:00 CEST, Tuesday 16th June

Testing is changing—again. Roles are being reshaped, automation and AI dominate the headlines, and many testers feel their jobs are shrinking. But your impact doesn’t have to. The real challenge is not just surviving these changes, but owning your career and stepping into leadership—whether or not you have the title.

In this session, Paul Gerrard draws on decades of experience coaching and mentoring testers, test managers, and QA leaders to show how every tester can design a career that thrives in uncertain times. He contrasts career drift – falling into roles by accident – with career design – making intentional choices about your direction, values, and impact. Testers who take ownership of their professional journey move from being reactive survivors to proactive leaders.

The talk introduces practical strategies drawn from design thinking and real-world coaching practice: identifying your core strengths and values, tracking your market value, running “career fire drills” to stay adaptable, and building a portfolio of portable career assets.

Paul also highlights the three skill areas that distinguish great testers and leaders—business knowledge, leadership, and communication—and shows how investing in these prepares you for any context, from agile product teams to large-scale digital transformation.

EuroSTAR’s theme is “Testing at its Best.” But testing is only at its best when testers themselves are at their best. That requires confidence, clarity, and leadership—qualities that can be learned and practiced. This talk is a call to action: stop waiting for organisations to define your path.

Own your testing career and lead it forward.

What you will learn

How to move from career drift to career design by taking ownership of your professionaljourney.
Practical strategies—values, market value, fi re drills, asset portfolios—for future-proofi ngyour career.
Why business, leadership, and communication skills are the keys to thriving as a tester inany context.

Session Details

Intermediate
45mins
Includes 15min Q&A
Developing and nurturing essential soft skills

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Session Speakers

Paul Gerrard

Gerrard Consulting, UK

Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, vlogger and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance.

He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.

He was the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR conference in Dublin and for several other conferences in recent years.

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