The 12-week manual tester to SDET roadmap
If you have been a manual tester for three or four years and your salary has flatlined, here is the path I have watched 8,000+ students walk in 12 weeks.
Why 12 weeks
The bottleneck for most manual testers is not Java syntax. It is framework intuition. You can spend six months memorising Selenium calls without ever understanding why a Page Object matters or why your TestNG suite hangs. The roadmap below front-loads the intuition.
Weeks 1 to 4: code fluency
You spend the first four weeks on Java fundamentals, but only the parts that show up in test frameworks. Collections, exception handling, file I/O, generics. Then build five console programs that exercise each pillar.
By the end of week 4 you should be able to read other people's automation code without freezing.
Weeks 5 to 8: Selenium and Playwright
Now you wire your fluency to a browser. Page Object Model first, then a Factory layer, then a TestNG runner with retry logic. Halfway through week 7 you re-implement everything in Playwright so you understand the abstractions, not just one tool.
Weeks 9 to 10: API and CI
Rest Assured for API testing, then Jenkins for CI. By the end of week 10 your framework runs on every commit and posts results to Slack.
Weeks 11 to 12: interview prep
The last fortnight is mock interviews. Coding rounds, system design for QA, behavioural. Five mocks a week with senior SDETs.
A finished portfolio plus 25 real mock interview reps is what closes offers. Not extra tutorials.