To become a successful Test Manager, you need coaching and mentoring.

Coaching is focused on competency and skill development. All professional sports teams have at least one ‘coach’ focused on developing team members and helping them reach their full capabilities. Test Management Coaching focuses on enhancing the ability of test managers to apply business analysis skills effectively to help them be successful in the workplace. The aims of coaching include:

• enhancing leadership effectiveness, performance and career progression within a specific organisational context
• development and integration of appropriate mindsets and behaviours
• focussing on specific requirements needed for the application of capability.

Your coach brings an enhanced range of skill-sets and aims to transform your mindset with new perspectives. The work is focused on ‘raising the bar'; your coach will help you set your career goals and then hold you accountable. Your results goals set the overall objectives and are usually stable, they focus on outcomes. Activity goals are reviewed and updated regularly and are focused on doing things that work towards achieving the desired results.

Mentoring is a more complex process and relationship.  The skill of the mentor is to help unlock the complex factors needed to allow the Mentee to grow within his/her self, ask the right questions from within, develop creative solutions, and find new ways to succeed from within themselves. Frequently the Mentee has a similar level of knowledge and experience to the Mentor but needs an independent third party to talk through issues and to explore options and new ideas with; using the combined depth and breadth of vision of both the Mentor and the Mentee to create new insights and knowledge. The aims of mentoring include:

• being challenged to explore and integrate new perspectives
• receiving guidance on specific challenges, including strategy and policy.

Your mentor has broad useful experience and the ability to share that with you at a practical and pragmatic level that is goal-directed and which you can apply to your own context.
The cost for Test Management Coaching and Mentoring services provided to individual proteges by Bart Bernink (excluding travel and accommodation) is typically € 125 per one hour session. Technical coaching in specific test management skills provided by other HJB consultants (eg defining a test strategy, automated testing etc) will be quoted, depending on the requirements of the protege.