About the Standard

This occupation is found in the public and private industries to ensure that their organisations fulfil the requirements of their customers and other stakeholders. A fully competent Quality Practitioner can work in a wide range of organisations (from multi-nationals to SMEs), including automotive, defence, food, pharmaceutical, nuclear, retail, financial services, logistics services, public sector and government. This occupation will also be found across the green economy.

The broad purpose of the occupation is to deploy effective Quality Practices in their responsible area to ensure organisations fulfil the contractual and regulatory requirements of their customers and other stakeholders. This includes four main elements: 1. Quality Planning (planning a delivery system for reliable outputs, such as implementing Quality Management Plans), 2. Quality Assurance (providing confidence to stakeholders that Quality standards are maintained, such as conducting audits), 3. Quality Control (verifying a product or service is meeting agreed specifications, such as carrying out inspections) and 4. Continuous Improvement (preventing recurrence of poor quality through analysis and addressing the root cause of poor quality, such as conducting investigations).

In their daily work, an employee in this occupation interacts with a variety of departments within the organisation (engineering, supply chain/procurement, manufacturing, and service delivery departments) and external organisations, such as customers, suppliers and certification bodies when required. Being the advocate for implementing Quality Practice and Governance. A typical day will likely include internal meetings to review quality performance, such as gathering and analysing quality performance data, inspection or audit findings, carrying out audits or inspections, stakeholder visits, interacting with people from other functions to plan the quality delivery system for their area of responsibility. Individuals will also support and develop people within and outside the Quality Function.

An employee in this occupation will be responsible for All aspects of quality in his/her area of responsibility, such as production or procured goods. This responsibility will be discharged through engagement with those accountable for product/service delivery, such as production / service managers, in order to meet Key Performance Indicators, such as Right First Time measures and Service Level Targets.

Individuals will be responsible for providing Quality duties within the following key areas:
• Support Senior Quality Practitioner and Leaders to formulate Quality Strategy
• Contribute to the management of customer satisfaction and supplier performance
• Deploy Quality Policies and Governance
• Guide and support others to improve quality competency and performance
• Plan and Conduct Audits and other assurance activities
• Develop Quality Control Plans for products/services
• Provide guidance on use of methods/tools to improve quality performance
• Solving Quality problems, such as non-conformances, and overcoming challenges to the implementation of solutions
• Effective application of quality risk management and mitigation to drive new products/services development