Essential Skills for Landing a Test Automation Job in 2018

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Every year brings new requirements in the test automation market. Test automation engineers must master their skills in order to stay ahead and land the job of their dreams. Following our last research: World’s Most Desirable Test Automation Skills, TestProject examined top job search websites around the world to determine the most in-demand test automation skills and technologies for 2018.

Research Methodology:

Countries examined: United States, India, Ukraine, Moldova, Germany, Poland, UK, Holland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and China.

Samples collected: 1340

Job search websites: indeed.com, glassdoor.com, monster.com, 51job.com, reed.co.uk, naukri.com, schwabjobs.com, stepstone.de, jouwictvacature.nl.

Key Findings: Landing a Test Automation Job

• From the data collected, every 4th test automation engineer is expected to have experience with Jenkins. This is quite interesting, since Jenkins usually operates with CI framework rather than being used for test automation. This shows the close relationship between the two fields and the popularity of Jenkins in many organizations.
• Java is the leading language among all examined countries, followed by JavaScript, C# and Python, which all reached the second place.
• Selenium is globally rated as a top priority in the test automation field. It scaled up from last year’s 29% to 36%, meaning that as a test automation engineer, one should master Selenium!
• Appium is no longer the mobile test automation rising star. From last year’s demand of 8%, it decreased to only 4%. It might be related to library stability issues on the latest versions, or due to the diversity of solutions that are becoming available lately for mobile test automation.
• There is a continuously growing need in the industry for test automation engineers who possess knowledge in Linux (from last year’s need of 34% to 40% nowadays), and this need also greatly bypasses that of Microsoft (23%). It’s probably related to the fact that during the last several years, Microsoft embraced Linux (and open source in general) and its mission now seems to be all about bringing Microsoft tools to wherever its users are. In addition to these two operating systems, we found that there’s close competition between Android (20%) and macOS (17%).

The Most Demanded Test Automation Tools Worldwide

The graph below demonstrates the distribution of the top 7 test automation tools worldwide, and concludes that: QTP/UFT is the most popular among the commercial tools, whereas Selenium dominates in all categories. In addition, JUnit and TestNG are very popular test automation frameworks. Moreover, Cucumber has built its reputation as the most popular BDD test automation framework.

In addition to these top seven finalists, there are many other test automation tools that are in demand, as seen in the graph below:

High Demand Test Automation Tools and Programming Languages per Country

The winning combination of test automation skills for landing the test automation job of your dreams are:

Europe: Selenium Web driver, Cucumber test automation framework (indicates the great popularity of the BDD approach), Java as the first priority programming language or JavaScript as the second best.

USA: Aside from the traditional demand for Selenium and Java, USA is the only country where Microsoft’s automation tools are very popular. This correlates with the fact that C# is the second most demanded programming language (right after Java, of course).

China: Robot and JUnit are the leading frameworks, and Java and Python are in a head-to-head “battle” as the most demanded programming language. In addition, test automation engineers who are web automation experts will have a greater chance at landing a test automation job in China, rather than mobile automation experts.

India: Only in India does QTP/UFT bypass the highly popular Selenium Web driver. Java is the first priority and Python (with a slight difference) landed in second place as the most demanded programming language. In addition, TestNG is the most popular framework and KDT is the dominant approach.

Russia: The implementation of the JUnit framework with Selenium and/or Appium are the most common, therefore you must excel in these tools to achieve your dream job. In addition, the preferred programming languages are Java and JavaScript.

Most Demanded Test Automation Tools

Most Demanded Programming Languages per Country

The Most Demanded Programming Languages Worldwide

As demonstrated in the graph below and in accordance with our previous research, Java turns out to be the most demanded programming language. In addition, JavaScript continues to maintain its popularity, mainly due to the rise in implementation of JavaScript development frameworks and libraries such as ReactJS & AngularJS – two technologies that dominate the entire front-end development market!

Another popular language is Python with a large scale of libraries and capabilities. Python is OS agnostic and intuitive, capabilities that turn it into the most preferred scripting language among test automation professionals.