Can a Manual Tester survive in software industry without learning Automation?
Survive - Yes, but be valuable and desirable on a job market in the long run - No.
Let me expand on this thought.
- you can, of course, grow as a professional doing manual testing only exploring new techniques and methodologies, testing different products in various industries and fields. Trying different tools and workflows. But, in my opinion, the next step has to be test automation.
- if a tester, instead of writing an automated test for a problem, would record the steps to reproduce in manual test scenario and would then rely on the fact that in the future this particular scenario would be manually-processed for every new release of the product, this process will eventually fail. On the contrary, if a tester would write an automated test for this problem and this test will be executed daily or as a pre-release process, there is much higher chance of avoiding regression here. Automate everything you can, do not rely on humans!