Chapter Twelve · The Launch
Your QA Career
The chapter that turns eleven chapters of skill into a job. Manufacture a portfolio the market hires on (four artifacts, a two-week plan), walk into the predictable four-round junior interview with the answer key, survive the first 90 days by earning trust in the right order — and then look up: the growth paths, the durable fundamentals, and the seven principles re-read a year on, where the course closes exactly where it began, one turn up the spiral.
Everything before this chapter was the craft. This chapter is the career — and it reveals the book's quiet device: everything you "built" at Fernway was a portfolio template all along. FW-312's report, the SUMMER15 decision table, the modification charter that found FW-372, the Friday one-pager — the fiction was a rehearsal, and the assignment is to run it once more on a real product until the fiction becomes your resume.
Four topics. Getting hired — the honest market, the four-artifact portfolio, the resume without experience, and the two-week plan to build it all. The junior interview — the four predictable rounds, the strong-answer shapes, a full annotated mock, and the honest-unknown move. The first 90 days — learn, earn, extend, the relationships that carry QA's influence, and the four traps that are virtues overshot. And growing in QA — the paths, the compounding fundamentals, and the closing return to the seven principles.