How I got a job after clearing the Vskills Selenium Certification?

I was working as a Manual tester with experience of 3 years, but it was becoming hard for me to crack automation testing related interviews due to a lack of coding experience. Moreover, when it comes to automation testing a lot of companies tend to compare an SDET as a benchmark with a manual tester shifted into automation testing. Since I was never exposed to working on actual projects with the Selenium framework therefore I started exploring the basics of Selenium and understood its primary usage. Let me share my experience and journey towards learning about Selenium and how it helped me focus on building a proper learning style.

According to my research as a beginner, it was very important to keep the focus on some of the key skills to build on –

• Basics of Software Testing
• Automation Basics
• Core Java Programming Skills
• Web Technologies like HTML, CSS, XML, XPATH, DOM and JavaScript

While I was taking my time and concentrating on finding the correct way to learn selenium some of the things that I came across and wish to share with you all. These are some of the important parameters you must keep in mind while charting your journey to learn selenium.

Things TO DO when Learning Selenium

One of my learning while finding the best sources to prepare for the exam was that I need to develop skills with a focus on –

• Refreshing my coding skills by focus on Java programming Language
• Develop good understanding of Selenium Framewwork and its application
• Experience working on Live Projects
• Gain Hands-on Experience
• Learn to design frameworks that helps in your enterprise automation easier (i.e., abstracting complexity in the framework)
• Get exposure in API automation, databases automation, big data automation, and more
• Respond to queries in stackoverflow (by learning from other people issues arising real-time)

Things NOT TO DO when Learning Selenium

• Do not think that just by doing a course or certification will help you become an expert
• Do not Jump at writing Selenium WebDriver tests before learning a programming language well
• Do not just try to learn it all on your own, join communities to connect with people with same goals
• Record and Play is not automation testing
• Do not automate internet apps on demo website

Now, many people have apprehensions that one cannot learn Selenium simply by doing a course or certification. Which even I agreed upon, there has been a starting point. You need a structure to start your preparation. So with this in mind, I came across many online learning platforms offering Selenium programmes. Vskills was one of the platforms offering Certification with a Learning experience. Indeed, the description was very fascinating but I wanted to ensure that I do not waste my money and time.

Vskills Selenium Professional Certification

Given the depth of Content and practice tests available I took my chances and registered for the program. Believe me, it was worth the investment. The Vskills online learning platform helped me learn to create extremely reliable and stable automation tests with Selenium WebDriver as samples. Moreover, I learnt to design advanced and easy to maintain test automation frameworks with browser factory, Page Object Models, and Selenium Grid from scratch. It was a perfect match to my expectations.

Vskills Certified Selenium Professional Exam offers video lectures with a focus on each module in depth covering core areas of learning

• Test Automation for Web Application
• Selenium WebDriver
• Advanced WebDriver
• Test Design Considerations
• Selenium Grid
• User-Extensions
• Integrations with Selenium

Learning Experience

• Emphasis on Selenium Framework and Test Frameworks Types (Data Driven, Keyword Driven, Hybrid Framework)
• Offers Interview Prepartion tips both technical and non-technical
• Focus on developing skills to work on live projects
• Ample of conceptual practice test to revise my learning at each stage

The best part was that the certification focused on practical aspects with case studies and practice tests. Moreover, the learning motivated me to work on live projects and work on e-commerce websites. I also uploaded my projects onto GitHub of some of the popular websites written with the Cucumber framework.

Even though I was not looking much in return apart from the learning so that I can start practising real-time and get a good job. But once I cleared the Vskills Certified Selenium Professional Exam, I got tagged at job portals and Linkedin Recommendation from Vskills. There was also assistance in job search and preparation for jobs. Not only did it prove to be a brush up course but also fetched decent job offers. I am working as a Selenium automation Engineer now.

Certainly, this is not the end to my learning, there is a lot more to learn. I will continue with other certification programmes that will help me build my profile including courses specific to –

• Automation Functional Testing
• JMeter Testing

Apart from the learning opportunity, I would like to appreciate the user experience and support from the team. Also, they were very proactive and helpful in the whole process. It is surely a great learning experience and helped me kick start my career in automation testing.