Education & Professional Development
This page highlights my recent QA training, certifications, and mentorships. Each entry includes a verification link and how I’ve applied the learning in my portfolio work.
Limit Break Mentorship Programme (04-10/2026)
Provider: Limit Break
Why: Selected for a 6-month mentorship to gain direct feedback from an industry QA professional and better understand studio expectations for entry-level roles.
Key focus areas: Portfolio refinement, QA workflows in production environments, industry expectations for junior testers, and applying accessibility principles within real development teams.
What this enables in my QA practice:
- Refining my portfolio to better reflect industry standards and expectations.
- Improving the clarity and usefulness of my bug reports and testing documentation.
- Understanding how QA operates within a real team and production pipeline.
- Applying accessibility-focused testing with more practical, real-world context.
Future Ready Games Programme (04/2026–Present)
Provider: Future Ready Games
Why: Continued progression after the Games Academy Bootcamp to gain practical experience in a collaborative, studio-style environment and further develop QA skills through team-based game projects.
Key focus areas: Collaborative development workflows, gameplay testing, bug reporting, structured QA documentation, and contributing to shared builds within a team environment.
What this enables in my QA practice:
- Applying QA testing in a team-based development environment rather than isolated projects.
- Improving consistency and clarity in bug reporting within a shared workflow.
- Gaining experience testing gameplay systems in active, evolving builds.
- Strengthening collaboration with designers, developers, and artists.
QA 101 - Foundations of Game QA (03/2026)
Provider: Emerge Academy
Why: Completed to reinforce core QA fundamentals and practise structured bug reporting, evidence capture, and destructive testing in a controlled learning environment.
Key focus areas: Bug reporting fundamentals, reproduction steps, expected vs actual outcomes, evidence capture, destructive testing techniques, and practical QA workflows.
What this enables in my QA practice:
- Writing clear, reproducible bug reports with proper structure and supporting evidence.
- Approaching testing with a destructive mindset to uncover edge cases and breakpoints.
- Capturing useful video and screenshot evidence to support developer investigation.
- Applying structured QA thinking even in short-form or learning-based testing scenarios.
Accessible Player Experiences® (APX) Certified Practitioner Training (02/2026)
Provider: AbleGamers Charity
Why: Completed under full scholarship to strengthen my capability in accessibility-focused Game QA and apply a structured framework for evaluating player barriers and experience.
Key skills: Access & Challenge patterns, Player Feedback Loop, accessibility by design, evaluating player experience, applying structured accessibility vocabulary, and framing findings in player-impact terms.
Applied in: The Chef’s Shift - Core Loop & System Interaction QA Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Applied APX patterns to analyse player-facing pressure points within a fast-paced core gameplay loop.
- Used patterns such as Flexible Text Entry, Clear Text, Distinguish This From That, Do More With Less, Slow It Down, and Undo / Redo to evaluate input behaviour, readability, and recovery.
- Focused on how typing speed, multitasking, and UI clarity affect player performance under pressure.
- Used APX to distinguish between system failures and player performance limits.
- Framed findings in player-impact terms, highlighting where difficulty came from cognitive load or unclear feedback rather than intended challenge.
Microsoft Game Dev - Gaming Accessibility Fundamentals (12/2025)
Provider: Microsoft Game Dev / Microsoft Learn
Why: Build a structured foundation in gaming accessibility so I could design comfort and accessibility checks for VR and flat-screen projects instead of relying on guesswork.
Key skills: Core disability types (motor, cognitive, vision, hearing), common barriers in games, Xbox and platform accessibility guidance, mapping issues to real in-game options, and framing findings in player-focused language.
Applied in: Shadow Point - VR Comfort & Accessibility QA Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Turned course guidance into lightweight comfort and accessibility charters for tutorial flow, locomotion, menus and basic interactions.
- Tagged notes using the course’s disability categories so clusters of issues (for example cognitive load, text legibility, audio balance) stood out clearly in the workbook.
- Used the course framing to phrase findings as “problems plus options” instead of vague complaints, making them easier to act on in a real QA cycle.
Create User Stories in JIRA (11/2025)
Provider: Coursera
Why: Go deeper into Jira for Rebel Racing by framing QA work as user stories with clear acceptance criteria.
Key skills: Breaking epics into user stories and sub-tasks, writing acceptance criteria, thinking in terms of player goals and expected behaviour.
Applied in: Rebel Racing - Charter-based Exploratory & Edge-Case Testing Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Framed test ideas and charters as short “stories” (interruptions, LTE vs Wi-Fi, Bluestacks visual check) with a clear player goal and expected outcome.
- Linked RR-1 and RR-37 defects back to their parent charter so each issue sat in a clear story context.
- Used acceptance-criteria style thinking to keep issues focused on observable behaviour, not vague descriptions.
How to Create a JIRA Scrum Project (11/2025)
Provider: Coursera
Why: Learn how to model Rebel Racing QA work inside a small Scrum-style Jira project with a clean, readable workflow.
Key skills: Creating a Scrum project from scratch, setting up a backlog and sprint board, configuring simple status transitions (To Do → In Progress → Blocked → Done).
Applied in: Rebel Racing - Charter-based Exploratory & Edge-Case Testing Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Used a lightweight Jira-style workflow (To Do / In Progress / Done / Deferred) so each issue told a clear status story with minimal admin.
- Logged RR-1 and RR-37 with consistent titles, short descriptions and direct links to 1080p evidence clips, mirroring how they would appear on a real Jira board.
- Kept the issue list small but focused, favouring a few well-written tickets with strong evidence over a noisy backlog of half-formed notes.
Get Started with JIRA (10/2025)
Provider: Coursera
Why: Build a baseline in Jira before my first manual QA project.
Key skills: Kanban workflow (To Do → In Progress → Blocked → Verified), simple WIP limits, labels/filters (e.g., pc-gamepass, test-execution).
Applied in: Battletoads - Functional Testing Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Created issues directly from test runs, attaching repro clips and exact steps.
- Used Blocked to surface input-ownership problems quickly; moved to Verified with video proof after re-test.
- Kept short, consistent titles so tickets were scannable on the board and easy to reference from the case study.
Introduction to JIRA (10/2025)
Provider: Simplilearn
Why: Formalise the fundamentals so I could set up a clean project/board for my first case study.
Key skills: New project + board from scratch, issue types, attachments/comments for evidence.
Applied in: Battletoads - Functional Testing Go to Case Study
Practice in this project:
- Set up a clean board and defined issue types to match test execution.
- Attached short clips and screenshots so each defect was self-contained and easy to triage.
- Added clear, reproducible steps and environment details to speed reviews.
Game Academy Bootcamp - Games Industry Skills Programme (09/2025 - 10/2025)
Provider: Game Academy
Why: Completed to gain structured exposure to game development workflows, with a focus on QA fundamentals, team collaboration, and practical project delivery.
Key focus areas: Team-based project work, game design and production workflows, QA fundamentals, bug reporting, severity and priority, reproduction steps, and evidence capture.
What this enabled in my QA practice:
- Understanding how QA fits into a multidisciplinary team and production pipeline.
- Applying structured bug reporting with clear repro steps, expected vs actual results, and supporting evidence.
- Developing early judgement around severity, priority, and player impact.
- Building on QA fundamentals with additional Jira training to support cleaner tracking and documentation in portfolio work.