For Women Testers, do you advice moving into technical role or management role as she moves forward in her career ?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-part-1/

Q) For Women Testers, do you advice moving into technical role or management role as she moves forward in her career ?

[Anuj] Let me start by sharing 2 stories with you:

I recently ran Singapore full marathon. It was a gruelling course of 42.195 km with a very hot and humid conditions. In such a course, one seeks inspiration from fellow runners to keep at course and continue going. Many a times during the run, I looked up to female runners who were running better and strongly than I was.

A couple of years back a wrote this article: “What testers can learn from my wife” in Women testers website. In this story, I narrate how my wife inspires me professionally everyday. Being a woman in an extremely male dominated automobile industry, she managed to successfully carve a niche for herself, despite many odds facing her. She took-up and excelled in both management and technical path.

What I am trying to allude towards is that I don’t believe that gender should even be a factor in deciding or limiting yourself to choose any career path of your chose. Of course, there may be challenges in certain paths, but isn’t that true for anything worth doing in life.

One heuristic you can try choosing between technical and management role: If you like being with yourself more, try technical path. If you like being with people more, try management path. However, this heuristics is only valid for early stages in the career. As one grows towards more senior roles, even the technical roles need more and more social skills and management/leadership roles need more and more technical skills.

In summary, no career path is written in stone. Following 4 steps can help you reach your potential.

1.identify your strengths,

2.show appetite for experimentation,

3.if things don’t go as per your liking don’t hesitate to change course.

4.go to step#1.

I don’t see career paths from the lens of gender.