Your own worst enemy
Landing your first job or two is usually the hardest. You have zero experience, no referrals and no connections. Wouldn’t it be a pity if on top of all that, you will also get in your own way? When recruiting for a junior position, the interviewer has so little to work with, that the slightest fault is enough to differentiate you (for the worse). On the bright side, if you can avoid steamrolling over yourself, you have a starting point higher than some of your competitors. You can start by avoiding these self sabotaging ideas:
1. Listing experience and knowledge in your résumé, that is just not true
As I already mentioned , reliability is the QA person’s most important characteristic. If your CV claim something you cannot backup in the interview, any tests you might be surprised with, or even during your employment, there goes your reliability.
This includes listing things that you once knew, or had very limited experience with. Sometime during the last century (while dodging saber tooth tigers), I completed my first university course in Pascal. Sure, it will be technically true to claim experience in Pascal, but the truth is, that the time it will take me to regain competence in Pascal is more or less the same as it will take me to pick up a simple language I don’t know at all. It will be just as dishonest to claim experience in something I forgot ages ago, as it is to claim experience in a programming language I never learned. Almost all the CVs I get for junior QA engineers claim some experience in SQL. Most of them cannot differentiate between inner and outer JOIN.
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