Manual Testing vs. Test Automation
Both are 'QA' or 'testing' on a resume, but they are different jobs with different pay. Manual testers run test cases by hand, explore the product and report bugs — important work that needs no coding. Automation testers write code that runs the tests for them. Many resumes list Selenium after a short course while the day-to-day work stayed manual, so this is the most important split to check in QA screening.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Manual testing
Test cases, test plans, exploratory testing, regression cycles, JIRA bug reports, UAT support, TestRail — few or no programming languages listed.
Test automation
Selenium with Java or Python, Cypress, Playwright, frameworks they built, Page Object Model, CI pipelines, API automation — a real programming language next to each tool.
The question that settles it
“What share of your week was running tests by hand versus writing test code — and did you build the automation framework or add tests to one someone else built?”
Read the full definitions
Open the full tool for the other look-alike pairs, role profiles, and the JD decoder.