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. This is fine! But, in my opinion, the next step has to be test automation
- Regressions. If a tester, instead of writing an automated test for a problem, would record the steps to reproduce in a 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 part of a pre-release or post-build process, there is a much higher chance of avoiding regression here
- Human factor. Oftentimes, especially as a post-release step, there is a need to get a high-level check of the deployed application. Doing this manually would bring the "human factor" on the table. What if you forget to check some part of an application which ended up broken? An automated test has a lower to 0 chance to "forget" and would follow what it was programmed to follow line by line
- Human bias. Humans tend to have opinions; machines (well, I am not sure about that nowadays) do not - an automated test would strictly follow the instructions, humans may bring their own opinion with them. You may, for example, interpret words in a test scenario differently than the person who wrote it
- Faster feedback. Automated tests provide a faster feedback playing an important role in the continuous integration and delivery processes
- Manual testing can be boring. I remember the times when we had manual tests only. And, I also remember having motivation difficulties to follow the test scenarios step by step which eventually led to me skipping or mentally tweaking some steps I had confidence in. I remember being easily distracted from manual testing and not willing to restart from the very beginning, pretending to follow the scenario uninterrupted. Don't tell me you never done that :)
- Load testing. You cannot generally do load/stress testing manually
- Validation testing. Let's say you have an input with some custom validation rules. It would be generally easier, more descriptive and faster to check multiple values for this input with an automated test
- You will be a more confident tester. If you would bring a test automation skill with you, it will boost your confidence in the job and quality you are delivering - you would know that the bugs you've caught will not make it to production because of the automated tests you've written
And, don't forget that having automation skills would also increase your value on the market.