role
QA Test Engineer
Review QA Test Engineer role tasks, pay context, AI-impact notes, skill gaps, and cited evidence.
See my realistic path to QA Test EngineerCertification details change. Always confirm final pricing, availability, and credential terms on the official provider page linked in the sources below before you pay for anything.
Growing occupation - projected +15.8% through 2034.
The call: No certification is currently mapped to this role in Learnerside's cited data. Decide with the labor-market context below, and use the planner to compare adjacent roles that do have mapped credential paths. BLS lists Bachelor's degree as the typical entry education.
BLS projects Software developers - the occupation this role maps to - to grow 15.8% from 2024 to 2034. O*NET profiles the work as primarily Investigative (analytical, problem-digging) and Conventional (structured, detail-heavy). Weigh that against how you actually like to work.
What the numbers say about this work
Government occupation data for the role this maps to — Software Developers (SOC 15-1252). This is planning context for the occupation, not a salary or a job this role guarantees you.
- Median pay (occupation)
- $135,980 / yr · $82,460 to $214,670 (10th–90th percentile)
- Projected change (2024–34)
- +15.8% · ~115.2k openings/yr
- Typical entry education
- Bachelor's degree
BLS OEWS — occupation-level, national · checked BLS Employment Projections 2024–34 · checked This role uses a broad O*NET-SOC/BLS occupation mapping. Treat salary, outlook, and task data as occupation-level evidence, not a guarantee for this exact job title.
What it pays by metro
The national median hides a wide geographic spread. Below is the occupation’s median in some of the highest-paying and largest-employment metros, adjusted for local prices — regional price-level context, not take-home pay or a salary this role guarantees you.
| Metro | Nominal median | Cost-adjusted |
|---|---|---|
| San Jose, CA | $213,110 | $192,994 |
| San Francisco, CA | $186,640 | $161,435 |
| Boulder, CO | $164,560 | $156,423 |
| Manchester, NH | $162,090 | $153,412 |
| Boston, MA | $166,090 | $153,409 |
| Bridgeport, CT | $162,650 | $152,203 |
See all metros and how this is calculated → Sources: BLS OEWS (May 2025), occupation-level metro median ÷ BEA Regional Price Parities (2024, US=100).
What this work involves
The tasks the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET lists most central to this occupation — role-fit evidence to weigh against your background, not a measure of employer demand.
- Analyze user needs and software requirements to determine feasibility of design within time and cost constraints.
- Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures, programming, or documentation.
- Confer with systems analysts, engineers, programmers and others to design systems and to obtain information on project limitations and capabilities, performance requirements and interfaces.
- Modify existing software to correct errors, adapt it to new hardware, or upgrade interfaces and improve performance.
- Prepare reports or correspondence concerning project specifications, activities, or status.
- Analyze information to determine, recommend, and plan installation of a new system or modification of an existing system.
Skills that matter
The skills O*NET rates most important for this occupation. A starting map for what to build — weigh it against the specific job you’re targeting.
- Critical Thinking
- Active Learning
- Reading Comprehension
- Active Listening
- Writing
- Speaking
- Monitoring
- Mathematics
Certification decision support
Certifications mapped to QA Test Engineer
Certifications mapped to this role from cited OEM target-role data and the Learnerside role mapping, ordered by relationship strength and then Difficulty Score. This is planning context — not a guarantee, not an employer requirement, and not a claim that any one certification is best for everyone. Your fit depends on your background; pay/outlook context is occupation-level on the role page.
Adjacent, not primary
1 mappedUseful only for a pivot or neighboring track; not primary evidence for this role.
| Credential | Experience expected | Cost | Relationship | Why it appears here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
CompTIA Tech+CompTIA | Vendor-recommended backgroundNo prior experience necessary. | $129 exam | adjacent | Broad IT fundamentals; QA is largely tool/portfolio-driven (note).Official source |
Experience expected is what the vendor publishes about the background it asks for or recommends — never a pass rate, and never a Learnerside rating of how hard an exam is. Certification mappings are planning context, not employer requirements, job guarantees, salary claims, or ROI claims.
Quick Verdict
QA Test Engineer maps to BLS/OEWS occupation context Software Developers (SOC 15-1252), which has a national median of $135,980. Pay is occupation-level and location-driven - not caused by the job title or a certification. Below are the full cited labor-market context, the skills the role draws on, and the certification paths that map to it. This role uses a broad O*NET-SOC/BLS occupation mapping. Treat salary, outlook, and task data as occupation-level evidence, not a guarantee for this exact job title.
Fit Signals
- Investigative (6.05)
- Conventional (5.62)
- Realistic (3.61)
Skills & Tools
*Tools and technologies ONET associates with this occupation* - role-specific examples with ONET hot/in-demand flags, not employer requirements:
- Amazon Web Services AWS software (hot technology, in demand)
- Apache Kafka (hot technology, in demand)
- Atlassian JIRA (hot technology, in demand)
- C (hot technology, in demand)
- C# (hot technology, in demand)
- C++ (hot technology, in demand)
- Cascading style sheets CSS (hot technology, in demand)
- Docker (hot technology, in demand)
*Foundational ONET skills** (broadly shared across occupations, not unique to this role): Critical Thinking, Active Learning, Reading Comprehension, Active Listening, Writing, Speaking.
AI & this career
What we can — and can’t — tell you about AI and this role
Cited context only: an occupation-level outlook, descriptive usage data, an employer-language sample, and attributed research — kept separate. No Learnerside AI score, no automation timeline, no job-loss prediction. How we source this →
Occupation outlook · BLS
Where the occupation is projected to go
no BLS Employment Projections row for this role.
How AI shows up in the work
Descriptive usage, not demand or loss
For this O*NET detail, the May 2026 usage sample reports 39.21% of Claude conversations augmenting the person's work and 60.79% automating a task. Anthropic · checked Anthropic Economic Index dataset, CC-BY.
Across all occupations the same dataset splits 51.4% augmentation / 48.6% automation (May 2026) — shown so a single role’s number is never read as an outlier.
Descriptive Claude usage data, not employment demand, not job loss, and not a personal forecast; CC-BY attribution required.
Employer language · sample
What a posting sample mentions
not yet in the posting sample.
Published research · attributed
What independent research says (not Learnerside’s claim)
- Eloundou et al. estimate that about 80% of U.S. workers have at least 10% of their work tasks exposed to large language model capabilities (Science 2024). American Association for the Advancement of Science · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- Eloundou et al. estimate that about 19% of U.S. workers have at least 50% of their work tasks exposed to large language model capabilities (Science 2024). American Association for the Advancement of Science · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- Eloundou et al. explicitly disclaim any forecast of AI adoption or timing, describing their measure as capability overlap with tasks rather than a prediction of job loss (Science 2024). American Association for the Advancement of Science · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- OECD reports that high-skill occupations are the most exposed to AI on task-overlap measures (OECD Employment Outlook 2023). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- OECD reports that, as of 2023, there is little empirical evidence of negative employment effects from AI (OECD Employment Outlook 2023). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- OECD and the AIOE research find that AI exposure and automation risk often run in opposite directions, with the most-exposed high-skill occupations tending to be the least at risk of automation. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- Felten, Raj and Seamans construct an occupation-level AI Occupational Exposure index by linking AI capabilities to O*NET occupational abilities (Strategic Management Journal). Strategic Management Journal (Wiley) · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- Stanford Digital Economy Lab researchers find a roughly 16% relative decline in employment for workers ages 22-25 in the most AI-exposed occupations, based on high-frequency ADP payroll data (Canaries in the Coal Mine, working paper). Stanford Digital Economy Lab · checked correlational usage data, not proof.
- The ILO notes that AI-exposure indicators measure potential task overlap and cannot by themselves establish job loss (Workers' exposure to AI). International Labour Organization · checked exposure = task overlap, not job loss.
- The Anthropic Economic Index reports no measured systematic rise in unemployment attributable to AI in its usage data. Anthropic · checked correlational usage data, not proof.
Tier A research stays attributed and separate from BLS outlook and employer-language samples.
Core source records
This table lists the page’s core content records and when they were checked. Claim-specific citations appear beside the relevant text and may not be repeated here.
| ID | Supports | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| CIT-01 | Supports occupation-level wage context for QA Test Engineer. | QA Test Engineer BLS OEWS wage source | 2026-06-25T08:28:38+00:00 |
| CIT-02 | Supports occupation-level outlook context for QA Test Engineer. | QA Test Engineer BLS Employment Projections source | 2026-06-25T08:27:06+00:00 |
| CIT-03 | Supports skills, tasks, interests, and fit context for QA Test Engineer. | QA Test Engineer O*NET source | 2026-07-14T04:32:12+00:00 |
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