English
I’ve finished my university studies last year, so this was the first year when I was working on a full-time contract. I have never thought that I would say this, but I honestly miss going to school and studying. That’s why I was very pleased with our education benefit.
I work as a Tester here in Simplity. The most famous certification authority in the world of software testing is probably ISTQB. There are a lot of articles dealing with whether it is worth to take this course and examination or not. For me it was a simple choice. I wanted to learn something new, I wanted to be better at my job and I wanted to get this certification.
After a quick research I made the decision. I am going to apply just for the examination, not for the course. The course itself costs an insane amount of money and even though I could have asked this money from Simplity I decided not to. Instead, I studied the materials by myself and applied straight only for the exam, that was held in Prague.
I’ve read the materials, did a few online mock tests and felt that okay, this is going to be fine. Finally the day of examination arrived and I could go for it. The event took place in Prague right in the old town next to the Charles bridge. It certainly is a lucrative business to be a certification authority I thought. On the other hand the cost of the exam is very affordable. There were around 35 people taking the ISTQB exams that day. I went for the most common one, Foundation level. The test took 75 minutes and we got the results immediately after the finish. The success rate was pretty high. 12 out of 15 people in my examination room managed to get enough points to get the certification.
Couple months later I still had the feeling that I miss learning something new so I applied for an Agile extension to the Foundation level I already had. It was the same certification company, ISTQB, just higher level. The whole process went very similarly to my previous experience. I studied the materials by myself and went just for the exam. And I succeeded again:) There was probably the same number of participants as last time but I was the only one who was taking the Agile Tester extension that day.
I would like to believe that this certification made all of the participants amazing testers but it’s not true. We are still pretty much the same, just with more experience now and we know little bit more theory and we understand more why are some things done in a certain way. However the fact that we wanted to study, we wanted to do something nobody forced us to do, to work on ourselves is what makes us different. I want to be better, I want to take another courses and to study more. And I am very grateful and happy that I’ve found employer who supports me in this.
Roman Kundračík
Tester
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