Career Scope in Selenium-The Future of Testing

The biggest question that comes to the brain when we start learning Selenium is, is it a good career? Indeed, you'll have a lot of questions storming in your head at the same time about what are the career opportunities available in Selenium, how much do professionals in this field earn, does Selenium have a future, and much more.

This blog will clear all your doubts about choosing Selenium as a career and help you to reach your desired goals.

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Listed below will be the topics discussed in this article:

1. What is Selenium?
2. The Popularity of Selenium
3. Selenium Job roles
4. What does a Selenium Tester do?
5. Selenium Job Salary Trends
6. Which companies are hiring Selenium professionals?
7. Selenium Future scope
8. What are the skills required for a selenium Tester?

Let's begin!

First of all, let's understand what Selenium is. 

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source framework used for automating tests across different browsers and platforms. Multiple programming languages like Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc., are used for creating Selenium Test Scripts. Selenium is not just a single tool, but a suite of software, which contains everything to the testing needs of an organization. The list of tools that make Selenium the most popular and best choice among automation are WebDriver, Selenium Grid, Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and Selenium Remote Control (RC).

Now that you know what Selenium is, let's understand its popularity in the automation testing tools market.

[ Related Article: Learn about Selenium Remote Control ]

The popularity of Selenium:

Selenium is one of the most preferred choices for developers in the software industry. According to BusinessWire, Selenium is the most popular web testing tool which has a humongous 300 percent growth in job postings over the past three years. Tech research giant Gartner has also reported that Selenium has the highest adoption rate in open-source automation testing tools. But, what makes Selenium even more popular such that major organizations turn towards it are:

• A non-proprietary software
• Multi-Browser compatibility
• Multi-Platform Support
• Supports Cross Browser Testing
• Multiple Programming Language Support
• Support Test Mobile Web Applications 
• Comprehensive documentation and support.

Selenium is the most sought-after skill in the testing domain with massive traction in the US, Australia, UK, India, etc., where jobs are skyrocketed with lucrative pay scales. Many Top companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, etc., also prefer Selenium for their automation testing needs.

Next, we'll look at the different job roles you can think of in the Selenium world.

[ Related Article:  Selenium Tutorial for beginners step by step]

Selenium Job Roles:

The job roles in Selenium vary from company to company, ranging from mobile development to web application development. Here, are the few job roles that you can think of as a Selenium WebDriver professional:

• Selenium Tester
• Selenium Automation Engineer
• Senior Quality Engineer – Automation
• Java Selenium Automation Engineer
• Mobile Testing Lead
• Senior QA Automation Engineer
• Selenium Test Analyst
• Software Development Test Engineer

What does a Selenium Tester do?

Some of the key responsibilities of Selenium testers include:

• Determine the strategy required for automation testing using Selenium as per business requirements.  
• Create a test plan and develop test scripts
• Maintain existing regression suites/ test scripts
• Attend Agile meetings on assigned projects (these may include Sprint planning/ Backlog refinement/ Daily scrum meeting)
• Execute regression suites
• Provide solutions to developers/manual testers/project managers and stakeholders
• Evaluate new tools/ APIs

Selenium Job Salary Trends:

Selenium job salaries vary with respect to different companies, depending on skill sets and past experience. According to Indeed, the median salary for Selenium Testers in the US ranges from approximately $62,509 to $100,971 per annum.

 

In the UK as well, the jobs that need Selenium expertise are increasing with impressive median salaries of around 50,000 Pounds. The graphs presented below depict their demand and how much Selenium testers get paid on average.

As per Markets and Markets, the global Automation Testing Market is anticipated to grow around USD 28.8 billion by 2024. This clearly indicates that the market for Selenium is intensifying and showing no sign of slow down. Therefore this is the right time for testers to keep themselves indulged in this field to grab a lucrative career.

Which companies are hiring Selenium Professionals?

A few of the major companies that regularly hire professionals who possess strong knowledge of Selenium are:

• Tech Mahindra
• UnitedHealth Group
• Oracle
• IBM
• ADP
• Dell
• L&T
• Cognizant
• Deloitte
• Capgemini
• ValueLabs
• Hitachi
• CGI

Selenium Future Scope 

As web applications are considered to be the next big thing for many companies worldwide, test automation market trends are steadily rising up with extensive demand with Selenium. Many top organizations across the world rely on Selenium resources for their test automation needs. If you are ready to dive deep into test automation and gain advanced level expertise in it, then Selenium will help you to land in a better and rewarding position in your career.

However, no software has ever been produced without bugs; this clearly illustrates that the need for automation testing is ever. Hence the future looks bright for Selenium with endless opportunities.

Last but certainly not least, what skills should you possess to become a Selenium Professional.

What are the skills required for a selenium Tester?

The below suggestions will be helpful for you to discover the right set of Selenium skills required for the level of experience you hold. And, it will be a lot easier for you to improve the skill set.

Entry-level (0-2 years):

• Study Selenium IDE to record scripts and create test suites.
• Run Selenium tests from the Jenkins dashboard.
• A basic level of knowledge in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS is required to work with web applications.
• Should be aware of source code management tools
• Hold a good understanding of DOM and proficiency in XPath, ID, CSS, and By-ID selectors.
• Possess knowledge about test scenarios to validate application before deployment

Intermediate level (2-5 years)

• Should possess knowledge of Selenium WebDriver for web testing
• Prior experience of JUnit/TestNG testing frameworks.
• Any of Java/Python/.Net programming skills are mandatory.
• Handle AJAX calls using Selenium WebDriver's mechanism
• Able to add new features to the existing test frameworks.
• Monitor CI (Jenkins) jobs regularly and handle broken builds.

Advanced level (5-10 years)

• Work experience in design patterns and advanced Webdriver skills to manage projects. 
• Automate localization and data-driven test requirements.
• Having Knowledge in SQL will be an added advantage to test DB validation.
• Hold prior experience in behavior-driven testing tools like JDave,  Concordion, EasyB, JBehave, Cucumber, etc.
• Able to coach junior team members, if required.

Expert level (10+ years)

• Possess practical knowledge of parallel test execution in a virtualized environment.  
• Set up continuous delivery for live projects
• Should be proficient in integrating automation results using any bug tracking tools like TestRail or JIRA
• Manage automation agents on Amazon cloud infra  
• Debug the Selenium web driver source code and able to offer suggestions or solutions to the core Selenium team
• Able to build reusable frameworks and libraries using Selenium WebDriver to improve performance and reduce execution time.

Conclusion:

With much discussion around this topic, the final word we can say is that for professionals who want to build their career in Selenium, the field is filled with opportunities to prosper. Also, automation being the cornerstone of the tech world, people with skills in this technology can leverage huge benefits in the forthcoming years.

Looking forward to becoming a Selenium expert? Enroll in our Selenium 3.0 Certification course to kick start your Selenium career today!

If you have any questions related to Selenium career prospects, let us know by dropping a comment below, and we'll get back to you with the best solution.