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TheTesterSkillsProgram TeachingTesters toThinkfor Themselves PaulGerrard Abstract In 2018, Gerrard Consulting was approached by the IT@Cork Skillnet (https://www.skillnetireland.ie; https://www.itcork.ie) and Softest (https://softtest. ie) organizationsand asked to support an initiative that aimed to improve the skills of testers in thesouthof Irelandsoftwarecommunity. Around20 testing andQA managershaddecided to lookat their challengesand plan a way forward to developand improve the testing-related trainingavailable to local testers. The first meeting took place on 29 November2018. The presentation that introduced the initiative was titled, ‘Developing Testing Skills to Address ProductQualityChallenges’. What started as an attempt to create a 3-day class for beginner testers became a much more substantial learning and development (L&D) program. This chapter describes the reasonswhy the programis necessary, the current statusand howit is likely toevolve in the future. Keywords Software testing · Softwarequality · Software testingskills · ISTQB · Software tester 1 Introduction 1.1 Background In 2018, Gerrard Consulting was approached by the IT@Cork Skillnet [1, 2] and Softest [3] organizations and asked to support an initiative that aimed to improve theskillsof testers in thesouthof Irelandsoftwarecommunity. Around20 testing andQA managershaddecided to lookat their challengesand plan a way forward to developand improve the testing-related trainingavailable to local testers. The first meeting took place on 29 November2018. The presentation P. Gerrard Gerrard Consulting, Macclesfiled, UK ©The Author(s) 2020 S.Goericke (ed.), The Future of Software QualityAssurance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29509-7_4 39