Is manual testing becoming extinct?

Manual Testing is not becoming extinct but it's importance is being reduced. Manual testing takes Time.

Time is the key factor in Agile development. Companies would want to bring their application soon to the market. If they don't do so, then they have to face severe competition. 

Gone are the days when teams adopted Waterfall model.

Every company is pushing their Manual testers to learn automation because they are quickly moving from Waterfall model to Agile/DevOps models. Companies are hiring only automation testers.

Most of the companies have started to implement Agile(CI/CD), where automation plays a crucial role. It works on fail fast and fail safe approach. So the testing has to be fast to find out the defects and then be fixed to deliver a quality product.

Quick release of the application to the market also forces quick testing which is possible through automation.
As more processes fall into CI/CD, there will be less need for manual testing.

To have a win-win situation in this case, a tester must possess both automation skills as well as critical thinking

Things to focus on to improve your career in Automation testing

• Slowly but steadily, start improving your programming skills.

• Learn about new tools in the market

• Google them and check if they are relevant to your work

• Do a POC(Proof of Concept) to make sure it works for your project

• Attend workshops or free online tutorials

• Take development team's support

• One good idea would be to start learning the programming language that your development team is using to code. In this way, even if you are stuck somewhere, they will be able to help you.

• Most of the developers use Java. So start learning Java. It is easy if you practice.

Please find the links that I found useful while learning Java

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/
https://www.javatpoint.com/java-tutorial

Knowledge is power. Keep learning, keep growing :)

There is no substitute for hard-work

All the best!! :)