On SQAForums.com (where I help moderate), there are many questions about QA certifications as an aid to gaining employment.
Now, I want be right up front here. I don’t own a certification. I’ve never mentioned certification in any job description I’ve written. And I've never hired anyone based on a certification.
I’ve known some great QAers who had one or more certifications, but I’ve known many more equally great QAers who were not certified.
Still, I wondered if perhaps employers were now starting to require some sort of certification in their hiring practices, so I decided to check.
Monster.com is perhaps the leading online career network. And the CSTE and CSQA are two of the most popular QA certifications – administered by the Quality Assurance Institute.
So I decided to see how often CSTE and CSQA were required in jobs posted on Monster.
I went to Monster.com and searched for “Software QA”. I got 4458 results.
When I searched for “Software QA CSTE”, I got 32 results (a bit over 0.7%)
Of those 32:
- 4 indicated that certification was required.
- 24 indicated that certification was “desired, a plus, nice to have, preferred, etc”.
- 1 indicated that it was “experience with the Body of Knowledge” for this certification that was desired.
- 3 had the phrase in a hidden keyword. Basically they used a white font on a white background. So it wasn’t actually mentioned in the job description at all, and certainly wasn't required, but candidates searching using the word CSTE would find the job.
Most of those 26 were the same jobs returned when searching for CSTE:
- None indicated that certification was required.
- 24 indicated that certification was “desired, a plus, nice to have, preferred, etc”.
- 1 indicated that it was “experience with the Body of Knowledge” for this certification that was desired.
- 1 had the phrase in a hidden keyword.
