Growing Capability
The year was slowly getting to an end. Shopping malls started to discover Christmas music again, although the weather outside did not feel like winter yet. Michal, one of my reports, asked me to jump on a call with him to tell me he got an offer from another company he intended to accept. He would be a lead QA in a team where some junior testers needed guidance.
I don't remember the exact words he used anymore, but he was clearly not feeling very comfortable telling me. He thought he was letting me down and tried to apologize. There was nothing to apologize for. I was genuinely happy for him.
Three years earlier, his CV had landed on my desk. There wasn't much to it. Sales assistant in retail hoping to enter our Testing Academy and change his career. The CV was so bare that I almost did not invite him to the interview. Ultimately, I reached out, because I could not find a reason why not to do it.
This article isn't really about him. It isn't even really about the academy. We search for experience, certifications, years in the industry, familiarity with tools. We have entire industries dedicated to filtering CVs by keywords. We are trying to optimize for existing capability. I am convinced that we are looking for talent in the wrong places. Not just in testing, everywhere. I believe often times you can and should grow capability instead.
The academy was looking a little weird from the outside. We spent days talking about business value, drawing mind maps of elevators, writing instructions for making toast, discussing why people misunderstand each other despite using exactly the same words. We deconstructed supermarket self-checkouts. We played games that forced people to notice their own assumptions.
I wasn't particularly interested in teaching testing. Testing was the excuse, as it was my domain. I wanted to find exceptional people, help them grow and see them perform exceptional work.
Simona came from HR. Every lesson she would come to me with questions. They were not about yesterday's exercises. She had understood that already. Her questions were about where we were going. She kept trying to figure out why I had given them a particular exercise, what I was trying to make them notice, and what the next lesson would likely be. Half the time she guessed correctly. Nobody had taught her to think that way. It was simply how she approached the world.
Petra was pushing forty years old. Corporate career behind her, years spent teaching German, another testing academy already completed before joining mine. She didn't need confidence. She didn't need ambition. She had already climbed that mountain once in her life. What she brought instead was maturity. She has the ability to tell people uncomfortable truths without making enemies. She knows how to navigate disagreement without turning it into conflict. When I was thinking about succession planning, she was my number one pick in the team. Just three years of testing experience, but decades of being a capable human being.
Hatem burned out from teaching English and eventually found his way into testing. He once told me testing simply clicked for him. I am not sure if that's what happened. He is never stationary, always curious, always learning. Testing merely rewards this. Even after the academy finished, he kept looking for difficult problems. He started teaching himself software development because he wanted to solve an educational problem his son was facing. Nobody asked him to do that. Nobody promised him a promotion. He is not even looking to switch into a developer role. He just couldn't stop learning.
Looking back, I don't think those people had much in common professionally. Retail. HR. Bid Analyst. Teacher. What they shared was much harder to describe. They were fascinated by understanding things. When they encountered something interesting, they kept digging. When they found a contradiction, they didn't defend their first opinion. They became more curious. When they realized they were wrong, they didn't feel threatened. They felt excited.
I don't know how to teach any of that. I can nurture it. I can recognize it, sometimes. I could certainly destroy it. But I don't think I can manufacture it.
That changes how I chose who to hire. Most interviews are strange conversations. The candidate spends an hour trying to impress you. The interviewer spends an hour looking for reasons to say yes. Mine don't really work like that. I walk into every interview hoping I will want to hire the person sitting opposite me. I genuinely do. Over the next hour I'm mostly trying to understand whether reality agrees with that hope. Sometimes it doesn't. Most of the time it doesn't. But every now and then I meet someone who makes me think, "If I can give this person the right environment for the next few years, they're going to surprise a lot of people." That's all I'm really looking for.
The funny thing is that the academy itself became one of the best learning experiences of my own career. Teaching forces you to make your own thinking visible. You suddenly notice which ideas you truly understand and which ones you've simply repeated for years without ever examining them. You start noticing where people consistently struggle, where they surprise you, which exercises produce genuine insight and which only produce memorized answers.
In the last cohort I wasn't teaching the academy alone anymore. People who had gone through it two years earlier were standing at the front, teaching parts they had once struggled with themselves.
I've always enjoyed watching excellent people work.
Not because I admire them from a distance, but because I can't help trying to understand what they see that others don't. Every time someone around me becomes more capable, my own world becomes more interesting. Maybe that's why I care so much about helping people grow.
When you surround yourself with people who are genuinely passionate about becoming better, the conversations get better. The work gets better. You start learning from each other. Eventually, if you are lucky, the people you once taught become people you call when you need a second opinion.
