Two Possible Career Paths (unfinished work)
Robotic Process Automation Engineer and Testing Automation Engineer Positions
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Introduction
Two job titles researched in this article are robotic process automation engineer and test automation engineer. Those are both job titles in the information technology field and do not involve the automation of physical types of equipment.
These two job titles are relatively newly emerging in the information technology field. The reasons for featuring them in this article origin from the author’s prior experiences of using an RPA software, UiPath, and of being a small system owner who initiated, propelled, managed, and maintained the development and operation of the system.
UiPath is one of the most utilized applications in robotic process automation, along with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. Two motivations for the author to use the software were elevating an employee’s motivation for the company’s work by introducing a new technology and reducing the work hours of the employee. Thinking as above was needed because the employee worked part-time, a working alignment inherently less motivating, and the work involved repetitive tasks.
The automated task at that time was a series of tasks to conduct fund remittance through online banking. Online banking accepts CSV files and Excel spreadsheets, but using those files to feed the list of transaction data required an additional type of contract other than the contract the organization of the author had already signed. The volume was less than the new contract was needed, too.
Specific actions included logging in to the online banking webpage, navigating to the target type of service, retrieving items of each transaction, entering the retrieved data, waiting for a particular second, downloading the evidence of remittance, and repeating those processes. As the above description shows, robotic process automation enables a set of operations that human conducts automatically performed.(William, Bhangale, Varade, & Sharma, 2023)
The reason for the choice of the test automating engineering was the author’s experience of bearing extraordinary responsibility as the stakeholder of a monolithic system controlling all the operations of a company before coming to the United States. That experience has not only been the motivation for the author to major in computer science at college but also the reason for learning computer networking, cybersecurity, and the Linux Operating System.
Considering the author’s current age and the period of not working with rigorous algorithmic concepts, a pure software development job might not be the best fit.
On the other hand, the firsthand experience of determining the requirement, settling the specification, managing the projects, releasing new versions, deploying, and taking care of the infrastructure with solid ownership, despite the relatively small sizes, can rear the core incentives spurring companies to automate the tests in their development workflow. Their ultimate goal is continuous integration and continuous delivery, and that originates from the marketing motivation of meeting users’ anticipations. Not many young college graduates can comprehend those perspectives.
Career Path 1
Robotic process automation engineer is a new job position. It seems newer than Salesforce developers because while there is a dedicated career profile page for the latter (Infobase, 2023) the former can only be found as concrete positions on web pages of some recruiting web services. While some information can be obtained by reviewing those concrete position postings, objective evaluation seems to have not been available. Since the strongest and most realistic capabilities of RPA software currently prevalent are replacing human capability of web browsing and consequent tasks performed, the business process outsourcing industry and accounting firms involving processing many invoices and auditing tasks are potential employers.
An internship position of this kind for someone pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in computer science is found on LinkedIn. It requires basic proficiency in Python, and it also says it is better if an applicant knows web-based automation technology such as Selenium, an open-source application. Its compensation is as low as 25,000 to 45,000 Canadian Dollars (Genie AI, 2023). Because of the low salary and its overlook of any commercial RPA software, this position can hardly be a good option for someone pursuing a career in RPA in the U.S.
The benefit of this career is the possibility of intensive usage of RPA software by many organizations due to its cost merit. Since RPA aims to perform “formerly human performed tasks” (William, Tidake, Thorat, & Verma, 2023) by switching discrete applications and conducting pre-defined operations through the man-machine interfaces, implementation of RPA software does not involve some development phases traditionally needed. RPA can be applied to a variety of different ideas, such as “process performance, efficiency, scalability, auditability, security, convenience, and compliance.” (Hofmann, Caroline, & Nils, 2020)
However, following this career path can pertain insecurity derived from its transient characteristics and the scope of its automation capability. Candidates for the robotic automation engineer position should consider how and where to seek the next project.
The automation of processes by means of RPA can also refer only to the automation of individual activities or even tasks.
Copyright © 2025 Takeo Shimazu