A Five-Minute Guide to Quality Assurance Careers

Thinking of getting into QA? Well you’ve come to the right place! In this article we’ll be exploring what QA looks like in 2026, whether or not it’s a good career to choose, and how you can get a job as a QA tester.

What Is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is an often under-appreciated role in just about every production pipeline. In theory, the job of a Quality Assurance tester is simple – they’re the one whose job it is to make sure that the product meets the requirements. In practice this can involve many complex considerations and often requires real expertise about both the product and the audience.

A QA tester needs to know what might go wrong. They need to understand user experience. They need to test for edge cases that wouldn’t be intuitive to a designer.

For example, accessibility is a huge consideration for modern QA teams. This means speaking with disabled customers and finding ways that the existing product may fail them. Without gathering that information, it’s simply impossible to know if your product will meet requirements. On top of that, products need to be compared against recognised accessibility standards to make sure you’re meeting common best-practise goals.

How to Start a Career in Quality Assurance

This question depends a lot on the industry you want to work in. While QA is often seen as an entry level role, hiring managers are still ultimately looking for someone who knows their stuff. Whether they’re making vacuum cleaners or video games, your employer will need to see that you actually are knowledgeable about their product.

Whether or not you need qualifications will depend on your industry. Some may want an engineering background or a computer science one, but many will be happy for you to learn on the job so long as you have the right skillset.

What is that skillset?

The primary skills of a good QA tester are research, communication, and practical thinking. When you enter that job interview, you need to show that you’re someone who can put yourself in the shoes of a user and help to predict unintuitive problems.

Is QA a Good Career in 2026?

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Search online and you’ll find a lot of anxiety about the future of QA, in large part due to the impact of AI. Is this anxiety justified? Let’s break it down.

First of all, it’s important to understand that QA covers a huge spectrum of jobs. Although people usually think of software, effective Quality Assurance is crucial to building any successful product. As such it’s impossible to remove QA from the pipeline in its entirety. Many companies have tried and the result is always an inferior product.

So why are people so worried about QA in the software industry? Well, the answer is twofold.

Firstly, QA has always been seen as more of an entry-level job. It’s something that you can learn with only basic training while providing an onboard ramp into software as a whole. It’s no secret that entry-level software jobs have been axed in the last few years, particularly in the startup space where lean companies have always been the priority. QA has certainly taken a hit from this, with many developers now being expected to do much of their own testing, leaning on AI to help.

Which brings us to the second problem. AI can, in many places, make up for a lack of QA. It makes finding problems a faster and simpler endeavor. For some companies this means they can get by with a much smaller department doing the same amount of work.

But that’s not the whole story.

Just as AI helps solve more problems, if left unchecked it also helps create them. AI software development is generally seen by experts as being faster but less reliable. This creates more demand for QA in the long run as the problem is recognised.

All of this to say that, while there are fewer entry-level QA jobs right now, the same is true for entry-level jobs across the board, particularly in software.

At the end of the day, the purpose of QA in software is as much about understanding the user experience as it is about catching bugs. Even if AI could create perfect, flawless code, there would still need to be someone who could test the product to make sure it was easy and intuitive to use.

It’s also important to keep in mind that these problems are really only relevant to the software industry. Outside of software – in manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry, and food production just to name a few – QA is doing just as well as it ever has.

Put simply, QA isn’t disappearing any time soon and it remains a very effective entry-level role into many different careers.