TCQAA is pleased to announce our November event -- Insights on the QA Profession: Career Pathways into, and Around, and Standing on the Shoulders of the Toughest job in IT  

Zoom registration information will be sent with your TCQAA registration confirmation.

Meeting Schedule:

4:00 - Welcome, Social Time and Open Discussion

4:15 - Presentation begins

5:15 - Q&A

5:30 - End 

Summary:

We have invited two mavericks of the QA profession to share their career journey with us.  In doing so, they will illuminate the tremendous skills required for success in testing and QA, and how to leverage those skills to contribute optimal value to a team.  They will highlight how their ability to continue to grow and adapt their professional tool kit has empowered their success, allowing them to follow their passion and contribute in new and different ways.  Their individual career twists and turns echo the wild shifts and new opportunities experienced within the QA profession over the last 5-10 years. 

Attendees will be left with a broader sense of the benefits of a QA career, a greater appreciation for the technical and soft skills required for success to be developed along the way, how to show up as the valued resource they are needed to be on their teams, and how to grow their career from a broader context of the profession today. 

This will be a highly interactive, facilitated discussion – so bring your questions and be ready for some fun!

Our panelists: Rachelle Rood and Paresh Gajria both have more than 20 years of experience in QA and IT, have experience as instructors at college level in software quality, and have become process leaders and well respected leaders in their respective chosen emphasis within IT.

Rachelle Rood, Director of IT Operations and Quality Engineering at Prospero Health

Rachelle is passionate about quality and strives for continuous improvement while recognizing the need to improve time-to-market and return-on-investment to succeed in rapidly evolving industries and environments. She prides herself on being an accomplished servant-leader capable of delivering large-scale and complex software products and have become adept at helping organizations and teams in their adoption of change and newer development methodologies such as Scrum.

She enjoys coaching teams at all levels and keeping teams focused on delivering success energizes me. She is a professional with demonstrated success in Agile and Traditional project / product delivery, with senior leadership and management experience. I possess extensive experience in life sciences, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, finance and localization/translation industries and I am a dedicated advocate for quality, in all forms, and believe in the positive power that a well-formed team can have on an organization.

Specialties:

- Quality Assurance (strategic implementation, executive level management, practice and process development, test scripting (SQL/.NET/COGNOS), automated/manual test execution (practical and strategic),

- Agile coaching and servant-leadership to promote a successful adoption and implementation organizationally

- Speaker at local conferences, networking meetings and forums focuses include Agile, Quality, Iterative Approaches and Change Adoption presentations

- Public and Private Educator (undergraduate/graduate levels, course content development, delivery, class-room and convention style)

- Management (HR responsibility for direct reports, offshore resource & vendor management)

- Industries: Content Management, Life Sciences, Healthcare claims and clinical methodology, Pharmaceutical Benefit Management, Translation/Localization, Financial Services and Consultation experience.

Paresh Gajria, Management Consultant at Digineer

An Enterprise level Program Management, Project Management and Quality Assurance professional with strong leadership and management skills, complemented with extremely strong communication and interpersonal skills.

Experience with strong off-shore QA managed delivery models. All test teams directly impacted revenue to bottom line for the employers/clients involved. His multilingual ability alongside his cultural adaptability makes him a valuable asset for companies looking for a person who can bridge and improve an offshore relationship.

Extremely fascinated with problem-solution situations and an ideal hand when it comes to rebooting processes and streamlining them.

Eager to learn new industries & widening my ability to use strong Quality Assurance +Agile principles & ideas across a myriad of processes & organizations to help them improve & shore up their internal Quality practice. Not limited to regional work & open to travel national & internationally.

Specialties:

- Front end website testing experience,

- 3rd Party fulfiller integrations,

- Intellectual property protection application testing,

- Financial transaction technology testing ,

- Remote office integration via process documentation and training,

- Client management,

- Travel industry (GDS + profile management),

- MediCare compliance work,

- Configure, Price and Quote technology,

- Oracle Supply Chain + Manufacturing testing