The Selenium automation tool is one of the most famous tools, available from a more than a decade now. One can see its popularity from the fact that most QA job listings have Selenium as a must-have skill. The question is, is learning only Selenium enough to work as an automation engineer? The answer is no. 

So, what should you learn along with Selenium?

Programming Language (My Advice: Choose Java, C#, or Python)

First, you should be good with at least one programming language — choose between Java (the most used one), C#, or Python. Learn basic programming concepts, master object-oriented concepts, and learn data structure (collections class in Java, especially lists and sets).

Selenium as a Subject

Once you have a good hold on a programming language, practice Selenium as a subject as much as possible. QA Tech Hub's Selenium tutorials cover almost all the topics you need.

Testing Framework

There are a couple of testing frameworks famous in the market: TestNG and JUnit.  TestNG provides many features which JUnit fails to provide. See the comparison between TestNG and JUnit.

My advice: choose TestNG. Learn more from TestNG Tutorials.

Design Patterns

Once you are done with above three topics, learn design patterns like POM (Page Object Model) and Enhanced POM - Page Factory. 

Frameworks

The next level in the learning journey of the Selenium automation tool is designing frameworks. Theoretically famous frameworks are hybrid-driven, data-driven and keyword-driven.

If you are looking for something which is similar to the real-time project, go through Modular Framework.

Jenkins

Now that the test cases are ready, we can start executing them automatically using a scheduler. Jenkins is one such tool. Read Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment for more detail.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is one component of Selenium and is famous for parallel testing of test cases developed using WebDriver. It reduces the execution time of Selenium test cases. 

Cucumber

Cucumber is another framework which implements BDD (Behavior-Driven Development). Cucumber helps in writing test cases in plain English (it also supports many other languages). Cucumber reduces the gap between stakeholders and the development team and gives more confidence to stakeholders, as they can read all the test cases. Cucumber can be integrated with TestNG or JUnit.

Maven

A build automation and management tool, Maven helps you in managing the libraries, building the code, and creating the artifacts.

Git

Git is used for code management. You can pull or push your code and can share it within your team using Git. Some famous cloud-based repositories on which you can practice learning Git are GitHub, BigBucket, and VSTS.

Protractor

Since AngularJS gained popularity, most websites are developed using AngularJS. To test these applications using Selenium is very difficult because of some loading sync issues. Many wait commands are required to make the code work. Protractor, which is developed in Node.js, helps us automate websites developed in AngularJS. It's a wrapper written over Selenium.

There are a few more things you can try, like Docker, an orchestration tool, JMeter for API automation and performance testing, RestAssured for API automation, and Postman for manual API testing. I hope you now have an idea of what you should know in 2018 to crack QA interviews. 

Thanks for reading. Please share your feedback and feel free to add a topic or tool I missed!