My 2 cents on this topic.
As being in IT and 4 yrs of QA from reputated company, the following are my tips.

1>First and farmost is to have common sense (ofcourse we all desi's have..).

2>Understandiong of the SDLC(Software development life cycle)
- Requirement phase(BRD..business requirement documents)
- Design Phase (FRD/DDD.. Functional req'mnt doc's, detail design docs)
- Development Phase (Coding, unit testing)
- Testing (functional/regression/automated using tools such as QTP)
- Production Implementation
- Production tickets and fixes and testing again...goes on a loop...

3>Testing: Have to deside first weather you are going for Manual or Automation...No matter which type of testing..you have to understand the requirement (by attending the JAD session's or reading the BRD/FRD)..then
- Writing the test plan (high level testing approach in predefined format)
- Writing test cases (micro level description of the testing activity)
- Test execution (conduct the activity mention in the test case and
document the result and open the ticket/bug if the result is failed
- The above mentioned tasks can be documented using some tools(test
director) or excell sheet

4>Automation: using tools like QTP..
- Need to record the activity manually using the tool and feed the input to
the recorded activity and initiate the exectuion. ex. winrunner
- Load testing : observe/document the behavior of the software when the
load is increased (ex:increasing the virtual users hitting the website)
- Regression testing: testing the existing functionality after the new functionality added.. this task will be repeated for every release

5>I hope the above content will usefull for your selection of course or learning process. The above is the real time experience of mine and might differ from company to company.

6>There are several types of testing jobs listed inthe market and the above is simple functional testing. candidate should be learning other technologies or proprietery softwares to get the edge on the market(ex:amdocs, SAP, tools)

all the best to future testers.
rgds
mrk

-----------------------------------------------------------------
MK

Thanks. Mkannuri..

That was a great piece of info i was lookin for...