What is a career in quality?

In a nutshell:

• Quality management is a whole organization management approach that drives improvement
• Quality professionals use quality management approaches and tools to help organizations improve and to consistently meet customer and stakeholder needs
• Quality professionals work in a variety of quality functions such as systems management, product and service quality assurance, quality auditing, supply chain quality management and business improvement projects
• Many people move into quality having spent earlier parts of their career in another discipline because of their wish to gain a wider understanding of organizational issues. They then find it straightforward to move into different sectors or consultancy applying the quality management approaches and tools.

Quality is a fundamental part of every organization and its value is focused on the overall organization effectiveness. If the organization fails to meet customer needs by consistently providing the quality of service and product customers expect then it will lose out to competitors that do.

If the organization fails to cut out waste and improve efficiency it will lose effectiveness and fail to keep up with the competition. Failing to comply with standards and regulations may attract financial penalties and will damage the organization’s reputation and brand.

Quality management professionals spend their time helping organizations identify opportunities, risks and problems. They facilitate successful implementation of improvement in order to seize opportunities, manage risks and solve problems.

In fact, the quality professional is one of the few people in a business who view the organization as a whole system, ensuring that the processes within that system deliver the outcomes that the organization and its customers and stakeholders want.

At the strategic level, quality professionals use whole organization approaches - such as total quality management, business excellence and the balanced scorecard - to ensure that the organization translates its objectives into outcomes.

In other situations, quality professionals may be focused on improvement projects to reduce waste or increase efficiency using data analysis and problem solving and process improvement tools, such as six sigma.

Another important role of quality professionals is compliance management – ensuring that management systems ensure products and services comply with industry standards, regulations and other requirements.