Reader,

Back in March, I ended up chatting with Testlio's founder about her business model after she reached out to me about one of my LinkedIn posts.

She told me it all started because she was frustrated by what she saw in the community:

• testers competing for bugs
• no teamwork
• overall lots of stress in the freelance testing world

And she wanted to do something about it, so Testlio started paying testers by the hour, a strange concept at the time.

I saw a post recently that reminded me how small our little QA world is.

A TripleTen grad I know has been crushing it on Testlio since May, and he just got his 50-hour badge with them.

If you're applying to jobs right now, you might be thinking the only way you'll get experience is by doing personal projects for free or getting that lucky break with a company you've applied to.

But Ryley's story shows you have a 3rd option: freelance testing.

I'll admit I haven't gone down this route but it's been very interesting to me.

Probably not a good idea to do while full-time and working on other projects like my course, but if I ever found myself out of a job, Testlio would be my go-to.

The founder's got a heart of gold and I'm starting to see proof from freelancers like Ryley that it's a good platform for new testers.

This is all to show that you're not stuck waiting around for that call back from a recruiter.

You've got options...

...options I talk about in this blog post I got published with QA Jobs, a QA job board startup.

Oh yeah, and their job board's great, too. I even saw my first employer on there posting a job for a QA Automation Manager, so you know they're legit.

You're not alone, and you're not out of options.

The opportunities are sprouting like sunflowers in the summertime, and they keep on coming.

You just have to look.

Now if you're out of work and trying to break into QA and you haven't applied to freelance on Testlio yet, or you haven't tried this new job board, and you haven't started bringing attention to yourself on LinkedIn, I'm not sure what to tell ya.

I'll be launching my course in less than 2 weeks now, and it should help with drawing the right kind of attention to yourself.

You want people to look. Sorry, I know you might be shy or you might not feel confident about your abilities, but hiding in the shadows won't serve you in the new economy.

You're going to have to get loud.

So start making connections and building stuff in public, or you'll just be another number in the resume pile.

I don't make the rules. I just follow them.

Keep an eye out for the pre-launch if you're a waitlister, but otherwise, I'll have the sales page up soon for you to review what I'm promising in the course in greater detail.

Aside from that 1 detail, I'm like 90% ready for launch day.

Hoping to get time for some feature work in the course before then, but I'll probably find myself doing that on weekends at this point.

2 hours a day is not a lot, apparently 😜

Anyway, you didn't come here to read about all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

I strongly urge you to try freelancing on Testlio and see where that gets you.

If you do it, talk about it. Like Ryley over there.

Happy Wednesday.

Cheers,

Steven