Quality Assurance Engineering: A High-Demand Tech Career Most Students Overlook
SkillNexis Career Team · 2026-05-12
Every piece of software deployed to millions of users goes through a Quality Assurance process. Yet QA engineering remains one of the most under-recruited specialisations in India's tech hiring market — creating a significant opportunity for students who pursue it intentionally.
Why QA Automation Is Booming
As software release cycles accelerate to daily or weekly deployments (CI/CD), companies cannot rely on manual testers alone. Automated test suites that run on every code commit are essential. QA Automation Engineers who can write Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, or Appium tests are among the fastest-growing job titles in 2026.
Salary Expectations
Manual QA Tester: Rs 3-6 LPA fresher. QA Automation Engineer (Selenium/Python): Rs 5-12 LPA. Senior SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test): Rs 12-25 LPA. The automation specialisation commands a 60-80% salary premium over manual testing roles.
The Career Path
Start with manual testing fundamentals, learn bug tracking tools (Jira, TestRail), move to Selenium WebDriver with Python or Java, add API testing with Postman, then integrate with CI/CD using Jenkins or GitHub Actions. This is exactly the progression Skill Nexis's QA Tester internship follows across 4 weeks.