ACADEMY HELPS SAFEGUARD UK BUSINESSES AMIDST CONTINUING HIGH PROFILE INDUSTRY IT FAILURE
The S&A Transform Group (The S&A Group), which recently invested over £1.5m into three new specialised apprenticeship training academies in tech, science, and business, has expanded its software testing academy across the UK.
The decision to expand is in response to a rapidly growing crisis that is engulfing the software testing industry, the company stated, where there are not enough quality assurance testers, release and delivery managers and site reliability engineers (SREs) maintaining modern cloud infrastructures.
The crisis was exacerbated through the pandemic when many UK companies were forced to rapidly accelerate and advance their digital technology programmes to ensure business continuity and adapt to the global shift. This meant many companies were rolling out technology programmes without robust testing, and with that came software defects and systems failures affecting millions of customers.
Software testing is crucial to how every single piece of technology functions and operates. Glitches in computers, website crashes, or a credit card machine failures are often caused by software not working due to programming errors, which could have been identified before release. Software testing is vital to ensure that all the software that drives our devices and tech we use in everything from our computers to mobile phones, cars, websites, ATMs, and credit card machines all work and function smoothly. When a software error emerges after release, rather than through robust testing, the impact can have catastrophic consequences, the company states.
The Software Testing Academy will commence its next national programme in June and will last circa 18 months for those wishing to embark on an apprenticeship and career in software testing, or quality engineering, as it is known. The academy is open to new entrants or to those who are currently employed and wanting to upskill and reskill through the apprenticeship levy scheme. Career changing skills can be learnt through innovative training approaches, such as an immersive, upfront fulltime ‘bootcamp’ of rapid learning. Thus, enabling employers to benefit from their new employees testing skills almost immediately.
Photo: S&A Group founder and CEO Darren Coomer
