Posted: May 14, 2020

Masters of the Ministry: The Community’s Best Software Testing Training

After the huge success of TestBash Home, our first online conference, we are very excited to announce the launch of Masters of the Ministry (MotM), a community-driven online and face-to-face training initiative concocted by Richard “BossBoss” Bradshaw, and developed in collaboration with members of the community. 

MotM main goal is to make world-class training more accessible to the community and to support those awesome testers who take the time to develop these amazing workshops and courses. We’ve been working on MotM and its format for years, and we have finally got the technology in place to make it happen! 

What is Masters of the Ministry?

Masters of the Ministry is the place to both share and access the community’s best software testing training. 

  1. Share training: Software testers with training expertise can share their best training offerings with the community by adding them to the MotM catalogue. They will then become a Master of the Ministry! 🧠💪
  2. Access training: Community members looking to access the best software testing training around can search, register interest, book and attend the Masters of the Ministry training courses either online or face-to-face in their city or company.

What Are the Benefits of MotM?

At various conferences around the world, some pretty awesome members of our community are running workshops, tutorials and training courses that inspire and advance the careers of others. For these trainers, it takes days or even weeks to design and develop these training courses, with the majority of them only getting run a few times a year. For the wannabe trainees, they have to be privileged enough to be able to attend the conference (wherever that may be!) or lucky enough that their company is able to find and book these testing training masters at their place of work. 

We feel it’s high time to provide another avenue for trainers to benefit from all this hard work and to increase the access to these career-changing courses to our global community. We believe MotM is the answer!

Some insights from BossBoss

“The training that has brought me the most value has been courses and workshops led by community members at conferences. Masters of the Ministry will make these courses more accessible by bringing these great training courses to you.”

Richard Bradshaw, BossBoss

MotM The Details:

Here are the finer points of submitting and accessing all the awesome training the community has to offer:

How Do I Submit My Training?

To add your training course or workshop abstract to the Masters of the Ministry catalogue, simply complete this form (NB: you’ll need an MoT account and to have created a profile to submit). The MoT team will review your training submission to make sure it meets the high-quality training programmes we put together for our TestBash software testing conferences.

Remember, your training abstract is your opportunity to explain the benefits of taking your course and to get the community engaged. It’s no good spending weeks developing training to slack off on the abstract submission. If you need help with this, we have a free Masterclass webinar “How to Plan a Workshop?” filled with advice on creating abstracts and much more.

You are free to write the abstract as you wish. However, there is a focus on creating learning outcomes for your training. If you didn’t know, 

learning outcomes are brief, specific, measurable statements that describe what learners can expect to be able to achieve by the end of the course.”

In our opinion, they’re essential and need to be created at the start of planning training programs. They have multiple benefits including:

  • Outcomes are appealing to learners who want to be able to achieve them.
  • Trainers can check if learners can achieve the outcomes by checking their activity output.
  • Outcomes encourage more active learning (generally!) so that the learning sticks.
  • Outcomes give instructors ideas on what content to cover and activities to design to help learners meet them.

You can find out more about learning outcomes in our instructors’ guide or if you prefer video, you can watch this video.

Due to their importance, outcomes are at the top of every published training course in the MotM catalogue, and for this reason, you have to submit them individually on the form. 

Your submission will then get reviewed by team MoT and added to the catalogue, or we’ll send some feedback and actions to take before we can add it. Feedback will include things like:

  • How to improve your abstracts
  • Creating appropriate learning outcomes
  • How to make your training suitable for online

How Do I Access Training?

Once you’ve searched the MotM catalogue and found the training course of your dreams, there are three things you can do to access the training:

  1. Book upcoming training: Some of the MotM training courses are already available and are due to run as online training courses (more about those below!) MotM courses also frequently run at our TestBash software testing conferences. In these instances, you can book your place on the training straight away!
  2. Register interest in training: This innovative feature will allow you to request that a training course comes to your city or country. Once we have enough interest in a course for your location, we’ll work with the trainer(s) to try and bring that training to your area and let you know about it first!
  3. Request to privately book training: thirdly, you’ll also be able to send a request to directly book a training course internally at your company and we’ll work with the trainer(s) to try and bring that training to you.

We strongly encourage you to regularly search the courses in the MotM catalogue, as new courses will get added regularly.

What Training Is On Offer Right Now?

We’re glad you asked! Right now we have two online courses on offer that have continually sold out at our TestBash software testing conferences and have been expertly tweaked and perfected to be run online with the same level of support and collaboration as the face-to-face sessions. These are:

  1. Automation in Testing Online 22nd - 25th June 2020: A three-day hands-on online automation training course that gives you the skills to strategise, create, use and educate others about automation that supports your testing.
  2. Software Testing Essentials Live! 1st - 3rd June 2020: A three-day online course from Ministry of Testing Essentials; designed to help you develop the in-demand skills and essential software testing knowledge you need to advance your testing career.

Book your place now to avoid disappointment!

You can keep up to date with all upcoming training on MotM by visiting the upcoming training page.

Ministry of Testing’s Long Term Goals

We hope that Masters of the Ministry will start to disrupt the dominance of certified software testing education, that in our opinion, is too expensive and slow to react to industry changes resulting in folks being out of pocket and lacking the skills and knowledge they need to do the job. With MotM being a central community-driven training catalogue filled with affordable, impactful, valuable and experience-based training; we hope MotM will be the new go-to option for companies and individuals alike.


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