Four out of the last five years, software quality assurance (QA) professionals have landed in the top ten happiest careers in the nation. At first blush, that claim may sound outlandish, but people getting paid to break things indeed have one of the highest job satisfactions according to Forbes: The Happiest and Unhappiest Jobs.

Silicon Slopes NEEDS quality!

The Wasatch front is a mecca for software development firms. Giants like Adobe and eBay have moved in, venture capital funding is booming, and construction for new firms is a constant around Thanksgiving Point. Quality is a key to our local success, and every single company is looking for a way to control it.

That’s where QA comes in, with over 1100 unique jobs posted locally just last year, and nearly 300 jobs open right now on Dice.com. The kicker? Many of those have been open for more than a month, or have been reposted to get new interest. There aren’t enough candidates to fill the open seats!

Without enough qualified people to fill the vacancies, companies are upping the ante to attract new talent, with the average salary for a Jr. Software QA Engineer at over $60,000 per year (salary estimates via Glassdoor.com). Many employers are forced to fill a position with under qualified talent that is then trained on the job, costing time and money they’d rather save by hiring someone ready and eager to tackle the challenge.

What is software quality assurance anyway?

In a nutshell, software QA is getting paid to break software. A QA professional will work with the software development team on a day to day basis, designing and executing tests to keep their code up to snuff. They will meet with project managers and business analysts well ahead of new projects to make plans to reduce risk and improve the product before it even starts development. The best QA engineers will work to automate as much of the testing as possible, so that when changes are made to the software (and change always happens, especially in software development), they automatically know that what worked yesterday will still work today.

Software Testers ($72,000/year avg) will follow a plan checking for any bugs, reporting them back for their development teams to fix. A Software Developer in Test ($78,000/year average) might work to fix some of the bugs they find immediately, without having to wait for another developer to get back to their code. A QA Director ($115,000/year average) will work at the executive level to make sure their teams are meeting the needs of the company and their customers, while getting their people the resources they need. From planning, throughout development, pilot and beyond release, quality assurance is there to make sure that the product that hits the market is the best it absolutely can be.

Kickstart your new career!

With so many job openings sitting vacant for want of a qualified candidate, DevMountain has stepped up to fill the educational gap. With a six-week program specifically dedicated to quality assurance, students become not just qualified, but competitive! Their course covers all the high points employers love to see:

• Git, HTML and JavaScript basics
• Industry standard QA concepts and best practices
• Design and execution of tests, test plans and test suites
• Unit Testing, Test Automation, Load Testing and API Testing
• Agile methodology

Every day students work with live code, learning new skills and putting them right to the test, capping off their journey with serious project work. They’ll apply and hone their abilities on real life applications so that they’ll bring their a-game with them to their next job interview. The market is hot, the time to strike is now, and DevMountain is the first bootcamp in the country to offer this program. Where is it? Right here in the heart of Silicon Slopes. Learn more at DevMountain.com.

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