Over the last year, we analysed job postings from leading platforms such as LinkedIn, focusing on specific QA roles. The general conclusion: QA experts are no longer seen as just “testers”. Instead, they are enablers of quality, facilitating user experience. Therefore, they are more and more acknowledged as key contributors to strategic decision-making. And that has some major consequences for organisations hiring or assessing QA professionals.
You need to make sure your future QA professionals have the right skills to succeed. Skills that are changing, as today’s QA professionals must be versatile, innovative, and deeply aligned with both business goals and user needs. These capabilities form the foundation for delivering high-quality, user-centric solutions.
Foundational expertises needed to design, build, and test high-quality software. This includes practices like architectural design, automated testing, performance and security validation, and CI/CD integration, ensuring systems are robust, scalable, and reliable.
Essential for identifying issues, understanding system behavior, and ensuring
effective testing. They can help cover activities like testable architecture, root cause analysis, and monitoring, enabling teams to design better tests, analyse defects, and provide actionable insights for continuous improvement.
Soft skills are the human-centric capabilities that drive collaboration, leadership, and
adaptability in modern IT teams. This category includes effective communication, coaching, empathy, and user-centric thinking, alongside critical mindset and change management.
Expertise needed to align technical solutions with business and user needs. It involves a deep understanding and knowledge of operational processes and end user expectations. This includes understanding UX, user expectations, regulatory and industry standards, business processes, and effective test data management to ensure products meet both compliance and customer satisfaction.
Vital for staying relevant in the ever-evolving domain of IT, and more specifically quality assurance. Continuous learning means pursuing certifications, attending conferences, engaging in communities, participating in internal training, and exploring career paths, all contributing to ongoing growth and development.
Sets the framework for QA policies, processes, metrics and standards
that guide testing activities within an organisation. Goverance means testing roles and responsibilities within the project team are defined and monitoring is set up.
With all the information we collected from our research, we developed a new framework with the most important QA attributes. This framework can be used to assess the current skillset of your QA team, discover gaps in expertise or knowledge, or as a guideline when hiring new QA experts.
We recently published a complete whitepaper with new insights on QA. The changing role of QA expert is but one of them. Download the entire whitepaper and discover valuable other insights from our QA experts.
Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
Kevin Stobbelaar
Director Data & AI
