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Going into 2025, many young adults are getting into the job market wondering what kind of opportunity there is today, and it can be quite difficult to navigate. With the U.S. economy changing so rapidly, it can be hard to keep up with the best career building options out there. With all the overstimulation from anxiety of a rapidly changing environment, this kind of uncertainty can go double or triple for the neurodiverse community. So let’s talk about it and see if we can help make this messy situation a little easier to manage.
The United States is poised to redefine their role in the global semiconductor industry with the passing of the CHIPS Act, paving the way for the U.S.A. to become one of the world’s leading SC manufacturers, essentially overnight. But SC fabrication is an incredibly technical field requiring advanced STEM degrees, so it can be difficult for those without a Masters or PhD to find a starting point in this new CHIPS boom. We at Aspiritech see this as an opportunity to redefine the starting point, the new “mailroom,” so to speak, and QA is that starting line.
The one thing that all tech has in common is that it breaks. That’s not a jab at big tech, it’s a statistical fact. Stuff breaks and is almost never made correctly on the first attempt; and that goes not just for hardware, software is usually the MOST broken aspect of newly released tech products. This is where quality assurance (or “QA,” for short) steps in; we test the products in development before they reach customers. We will rigorously perform every operation and feature of the product until we–quite simply–break it months before the product is even launched.
One reason behind us calling QA “the new mailroom” is that it is very accessible for entry level positions; most only require a GED, if that. The next reason behind the apt nickname is its reliability. Much like the mailrooms of the 20th century, QA remains a reliable field of employment and will remain so in the foreseeable future. Even in the face of new advancements in AI and automation, QA remains intricately dependent on human users interacting with the product. AI and automation have turned out not to be the job threats they have been to other fields, rather they have been utilized as new tools in our belt to improve the quality of our work. Has this made some of our project teams smaller? Yes. Has it led to layoffs? No! At Aspiritech, we don’t see this as a chance to cut costs–contradictorily–we see this as an opportunity to expand our services to new clientele, taking on even more projects.
Internally, there has been much development at our company as to embracing new technologies while preserving our mission to build long-lasting careers for our community. And there lies the third and most prevalent reason for calling QA “The New Mailroom”–because of the potential for growth. We’ve been noticing internally here that QA is a very effective jumping-off point for several different career paths. We’ve observed firsthand how our own employees start at entry level QA positions and have directed their careers onto various trajectories. The two most noticeable of these paths have been the emerging fields of automation and accessibility.
Our offered services have greatly expanded thanks to our teams’ ability to code and execute automation programs for the purpose of software testing. It cannot be understated that automation is essential for the growth of any QA firm in the modern economy, but many other companies out there might see this as an opportunity to “cut costs” or “reduce overhead.” Whereas in our approach, we see a more effective solution by retaining our resources and expanding to take on more projects. So, automation does not have to be the headsman’s axe many worry about. Instead, automation is the avenue for true growth, while keeping our employees employed.
Accessibility is a new avenue for growth as well, but in a more traditional sense. As tech becomes more prevalent in the lives of people all over the world, it’s reaching the people most isolated due to physical or neurological constraints. Then it should come as no surprise that accessibility hardware and software is a rapidly accelerating market in the 2020s with great potential. Ensuring products and services are accessible to all users is essential in growing market share for any product or software moving forward. Which is exactly what we at Aspiritech hope to tap into. We’ve taken on a variety of projects involving testing accessibility products with a wide range of applications. The growth of the accessibility market currently shows no signs of slowing, so we are going to take as much advantage as we can to develop our relationships with our clients and partners making accessibility products.
I’d like to backtrack to the topic of the CHIPS Act for a minute to discuss America’s new position in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. For a very long time, much of our SC production—including QA—has been outsourced to countries all over the world, and the security of that proprietary technology has been fairly lax. This is no longer the case. Now that the U.S. has invested in domestic production of our semiconductor industry, the security of our trade secrets is of the utmost priority in order to remain competitive in the global market. By utilizing/investing in onshore domestic QA, we are closing a significant hole in that security, while opening the U.S. market to new job opportunities for the foreseeable future. Additionally, onshoring our QA services will prevent significant bottlenecking of the American semiconductor supply chain.
Finally, we should probably address the five-legged uncanny elephant in the room. Generative AI is likely to be the defining technology of the 21st century; it is not going away and it will continue to become more present in our economy and our society. That is why it is imperative this technology is rigorously tested to identify and account for any and all algorithmic biases in AI models. In this scenario, the importance of the human role cannot be understated. Once again, QA has emerged as an imperative link in the supply chain.
As we can clearly see, QA will be a transformative industry moving into the 21st century. In fact, we at Aspiritech see it as the lynchpin between the success and failure of future domestic technology production. We hope after reading this article, you can see that as well and will help spread this message about our vision of the future. Strong domestic tech support and the stability of said workforce is crucial to the future growth of the American economy. We at Aspiritech see the future taking shape and, by sharing this view, intend to help lead the country towards prosperity.
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