Find the bugs before the customers do. A common side door into a tech career.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $73,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $36,000 at the lower end to about $107,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
Up to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
From nothing up to about $53,000, depending on the route, for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$73,000
Lower end
$36,000
Upper end
$107,000
Job Bank's national median is $35 an hour, about $73,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower end ($17.50) and upper end ($51.28) are the bottom and top of the wage range for everyone in the group. The job is wide: it runs from testing apps by hand to automation engineers who write code all day.
About $22.50 an hour
In Ontario the lowest paid tenth of testers earn this or less, about $46,800 a year
Job Bank does not publish a starting rate. A first job is usually manual QA (quality assurance) testing, often on contract.
$37.98 an hour
The median in Ontario, about $79,000 a year, the highest in Canada
Alberta is next at $36.70. Quebec's median is the lowest, at $20.00. Anywhere, the big step up is moving from testing by hand to writing code that tests automatically.
Roughly, all in
Nothing to $53,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Manual testing is one of the few technology jobs that still hires on aptitude, so the low end is genuinely zero. An ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) Foundation certificate has an exam fee and is optional proof rather than a requirement. The high end is four years of computer science tuition at one of the pricier schools, which opens the automation side, and a two or three year Ontario college diploma is the middle route at roughly 5,500 to 10,500 dollars in tuition. This is the cheapest technology job to enter and also the one where you most need to keep adding skills to move up.
From $0 up to about $53,000 in tuition, depending on the route. Testing is one of the cheapest tech jobs to enter, and one where you must keep adding skills to move up.
Salary
Banks, software companies, government.
Contract
Very common. Companies staff up testers before a big release, then let contracts end.
Hourly
Game studios and outsourced testing companies.
Crowd testing
Paid per bug found on platforms that farm out testing. Side money, not a living.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Many roads in, and the job itself is a road to somewhere else. Quebec has its own route: tap Quebec route to add it.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Computer science if offered. Testing rewards people who are careful, curious and a little suspicious. Try breaking the apps you use and writing down exactly how.
Training, or not
0 to 4 years
A 2-year college diploma in computer programming (Algonquin, Conestoga or St. Lawrence in Ontario, for example) is a common route. Some testers have a computer science degree. Some have no training and got in through a game studio or a contract.
First testing job
Months
Manual QA (quality assurance): following test plans, clicking through features, writing bug reports developers can reproduce.
Add automation
1 to 2 years
Learn to write tests in code (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress) and to read the developers' code. Get the ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) Foundation certificate.
Specialize or move on
3 to 5 years in
Automation engineer, performance tester, security tester, QA lead, or cross over to development or product management.
Computer science
Reading code is soon part of the job.
English
A bug report is technical writing. Clear ones get fixed, vague ones get ignored.
Math
Logic and edge cases. Also required if you go the degree route.
Any science with labs
Testing is running experiments and recording results.
No licence or registration. The ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) certificate is voluntary, but it is the standard employers recognize worldwide. In Canada the exams are run through the Canadian Software Testing Board. Foundation Level is the entry certificate, and the one the advanced certificates build on.
In Quebec the usual way in is a 3 year technical program at a CEGEP (public college), which has no tuition for full-time Quebec residents.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
The Computer Science Technology program needs Secondary IV math in the Technical and Scientific or Science sequence, or Secondary V Cultural, Social and Technical math.
Computer Science Technology DEC (Diploma of College Studies, 420.B0)
3 years
A 3 year CEGEP (public college) program of 2,670 hours. Covers programming, databases and security. In English at Dawson, Vanier, John Abbott and Heritage.
Internship
Final term
Most programs end with one. Dawson names quality assurance tester as one of the jobs its graduates take.
First testing job
After the DEC
Start as a tester, then learn to write automated tests. The DEC (Diploma of College Studies) is enough to be hired.
Mind the title
Any time
Only members of the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, the Quebec order of engineers) may use "engineer", so "test engineer" or "automation engineer" needs membership.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Test automation
Writing code that tests code. Doubles your value to an employer.
Performance testing
Finding out what breaks when 100,000 people log in at once.
Security testing
The first step toward penetration testing.
ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) advanced and agile certificates
Build on the Foundation Level and are common on senior job ads.
A bug portfolio
Write-ups of bugs you found in public software, or bug bounty submissions.
SQL (the language for querying databases)
Checking the data behind an app is a big part of real testing.
Domain knowledge
Testers who understand banking, health or games catch bugs nobody else sees.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Stand-up with the developers, then a build to test. You work through a test plan, try the things the plan forgot, and write up every failure with exact steps to reproduce it. An automation engineer spends the day writing and fixing test code instead, then reading overnight results. Before a release, everyone tests everything and days run long. Game testers may play the same level for a week looking for one crash.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
About 20,000 people worked as software testers in Canada in 2023. The federal government's 10-year projection, to 2033, warns of a strong risk that there will be more testers than jobs.
ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) had issued more than 1.1 million certifications worldwide as of May 2025, across more than 130 countries. Its vocabulary is the shared language of testers everywhere, including Canada.
Job Bank puts the median tester in Quebec at $20.00 an hour, about half the $37.98 in Ontario. Quebec is also the only province where it rates prospects very limited.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Support and testing first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
Tell us about this page. A person reads every message.
No email app on this device? Use Gmail instead: report a mistake in Gmail or say what you like in Gmail.