Posted: Jul 27, 2020

Maximise Your Potential With MoT’s Community Coaching

Get One-To-One Support From Experienced Software Testers and Coaches

Here at MoT, we are continually looking for new ways to support the software testing community by collaborating with our members. We believe we’ve come up with a great new initiative and offering; please welcome Community Coaching!

With Community Coaching, you have the opportunity to work with accomplished software testers with plenty of coaching experience who can help you realise your personal and professional potential. 

How Working With a Coach Can Help

Whether you are looking for a clearer direction in your career, suffering from imposter syndrome or trying to overcome a technical challenge on a project, working with a coach could empower you to change your mindset and find solution-based approaches to overcome your challenges.

What’s more, working with a coach can be done at any point during your professional path. It can be useful anytime from getting your foot in the door at the beginning of your career to guiding you towards establishing your own authentic leadership style in a leadership role. The potential benefits are endless but we’ve come up with a few ways a coach can help you based upon your current career level:

Getting Started in Your Career

When starting out your career or making a career transition in a new field, working with a coach can help you to:

  • Assess your skill set and identify the critical skills you need to acquire for your dream job.
  • Set SMART goals and build a roadmap to your destination.
  • Accelerate your job search by building a powerful CV and targeting the right roles.
  • Prepare for interviews and learn to highlight the value in your prior experience.
  • Unravel your emotions to better understand how they may be holding you back in starting your career.

Mid-Level Role:

If you’re feeling stuck or struggling with the new responsibilities and expectations of working in a mid-level role, a coach can support you to:

  • Find a clear direction for your career trajectory that will make you happy.
  • Identify personal and professional issues that may be affecting you at work.
  • Learn different approaches and methodologies to overcome technical and team challenges.
  • Improve relationships and communicate more easily with your team.
  • Become more self-aware and open to learning for your own professional development.

Leadership Role:

It can be lonely at the top and having the one-to-one support of a coach can help you:

  • Recognise your personal communication and leadership style and adapt them to use them most effectively with your employees.
  • Establish a new culture that empowers your employees to achieve the company mission and goals.
  • Use new methodologies and approaches to support and develop team dynamics.
  • Create a personal leadership development roadmap to further develop leadership skills, competencies and mindset.
  • Build connections to access a diverse network of leading professionals.

Who Are the MoT Community Coaches?

We are working with six experienced testers and coaches from the MoT community who’ll be able to support you with your coaching needs, our six coaches are:

  • Lena Wiberg: Lena is an experienced tester, manager and coach with a background in programming. She has worked in roles ranging from a solo tester and test lead through to building, improving and leading quality divisions. 
    She is an international speaker, facilitator and has worked with mentoring and coaching junior testers and aspiring speakers. Lena enjoys supporting folks with writing, conference speaking, career building, testing and management challenges.

  • Anand Bagmar: A Software Quality Evangelist with over 20 years of experience building quality products. In this time, he has worked in traditional and agile teams across varying domains in organizations around the globe.
    He’s passionate about coaching, consulting and helping enable teams to implement aspects of Quality and Test Automation. He is also enthusiastic about supporting teams to set up optimized and fit-for-purpose processes and practices to help build a better quality product.

  • Helena Jeret-Mäe: Helena has spent 12 years in IT and gained experience as a technical writer, test lead and tester, coach and mentor, competence head and quality coach. Helen’s favourite topics to help people figure out include:

    • Professional development as a tester (for the beginners and the confused)
    • Recruiting and onboarding testers
    • How to build a test team and lead people in a testing context
    • Designing and running workshops
    • Public speaking
    • Improving ways of working and collaborating that eventually improve quality
    • Test and quality strategy
  • Maria Kedemo: Maria started working with Software Development in 2000 with a focus on software testing and quality. Since then Maria has gained experience & knowledge in building teams, recruitment, teaching, coaching and mentoring testers, supporting organisational change and much more. She can help you with most topics related to software testing, as well as, support you in public speaking and career building. Maria’s approach to coaching aims to help you maximize your personal and professional potential.
  • Richard Bradshaw: Richard is an experienced tester, consultant and generally a friendly guy. He shares his passion for testing through coaching, consulting, training and giving presentations around the world on a variety of topics related to testing.
    He is enthusiastic about helping folks implement automation that supports testing. And, with over 10 years of testing experience, he has a lot of insights into the world of testing and software development.

  • Vernon Richards: Vernon has been working on software delivery teams since 2002, starting as a manual tester working on Xbox, PS2 & PC games. Now, he is a Quality & Agile Coach helping teams (especially testers) work more effectively together in an agile context. As well as leading & coaching teams for the past few years, he's currently studying for a PG Cert in Business and Personal Coaching with Barefoot Coaching. Vernon's coaching methods aim to help you improve your outlook on work and life while unlocking your potential.

Check out our Community Coaching page for more information on booking one of our coaches.

How Do I Book a Session?

We’ve made booking coaching sessions as simple and flexible as possible! All our sessions take place online and once booked, you’ll be sent an email with the time and date of your session along with a link to start a video call with your coach.

You can book a session for yourself, on behalf of someone else or even for your whole team:

I Want to Book Coaching for Myself: 

You start by choosing which coach best suits your needs, selecting your timezone, picking a date and time that works for you. You can book a one-off session, book multiple recurring sessions or even book yourself on an accredited coaching program. You’ll then be asked about your goals and aims for your coaching session so your coach can prepare for your session. Visit our Community Coaching page to book your session and realise your potential.

I Want to Book Coaching for My Team Members:

You start by choosing which coach best suits your team members’ needs, selecting your timezone, picking a date and time that works. You can book a one-off session, book multiple recurring sessions or even book folks onto an accredited coaching program. You’ll then be asked about the goals and aims for the coaching sessions so coaches can prepare for your team members’ sessions. You can then enter the email address of the team member for the corresponding booking and they will be sent confirmation of the booking and a link to the video coaching session. Visit our Community Coaching page to book coaching sessions for your team and help them realise their potential.

Register Your Interest in Becoming a Coach

If you have good experience in software testing and coaching and like the idea of setting your own working hours and hourly rate, we’d like to hear from you! Simply fill out this short form to register your interest in becoming a Community Coach with the Ministry of Testing. We will be in touch if we think you have potential as a Community Coach and once we expand this initiative to more coaches.


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