Quality Engineer Job Description, Skills, and Salary
Get to know about the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and skills requirements of a quality engineer. Feel free to use our job description template to produce your own. We also provide you with information about the salary you can earn as a quality engineer.
Who is a Quality Engineer?
A quality engineer is concerned with maintaining the practices and principles of product and service quality control. Quality engineers undertake software development, management, operation, and maintenance of enterprise structures and IT systems. They ensure excellent evaluation and correct control application of quality principles through diverse methods.
The methods used by quality engineers to point out incompetent quality control procedures and correct them are numerous. Some of the methods include product testing, development of quality control systems, examining results, and testing systems to increase the quality of products and ensure proper safety documentation.
Quality engineers are in charge of locating technical issues and solving them, as well as recommending solutions to improve the durability of products and their overall performance.
Quality Engineers mostly work in manufacturing industries and laboratories where they supervise materials used to maintain quality control. They also travel often to improve their experience and give them opportunities to undertake several quality control projects even though it could expose them to hazards and noise pollution. However, most quality engineers have flexible work hours to help them give full expertise to projects assigned to them.
A quality engineer takes time to check if the manufactured products meet the government standards and the company’s quality control requirements. So, to be a good quality engineer, you need to have extensive knowledge of your company’s control standards and requirements. The Nigerian Society of Quality (NSQ) has the duty of regulating the profession of all certified quality engineers.
As a good quality engineer, you should be a good team leader and know how to maintain an interpersonal relationship with your fellow workers. Also, possessing analytical skills and knowledge of product production is necessary.
Encourage your team members to be consistent and accurate in their productions and other assignments. Give them motivation from time to time and make them see reasons why they should be part of the quality assurance protocols. Don’t just be a commanding leader, assist them when possible and exert the right influence and attitude on them.
It is safe to have numerous quality engineers with different levels of expertise in a company managing different positions depending on the organizational and geographical boundaries of the company, to ensure back-to-back management of quality standards.
Some of the different positions include:
- Requirements engineer
- Security architect
- Business architect
- Project manager
- Security officer
- IT architect
- Product manager
- Test manager
- Product manager
- Software quality manager
- Project manager
All of the aforementioned positions make up the quality engineering roles in a company. Hence, to ensure quality services, processes need to be taken to put together all the different goals for the various roles, combine the data and information needed for the fulfillment of the tasks, and assign them to each person in the appropriate manner.
Quality Engineer Job Description
Below are the quality engineer job description examples you can use to develop your resume or write a quality engineer job description for your employee. Employers can also use it to sieve out job seekers when choosing candidates for interviews.
- Determining and developing quality assurance protocols
- Assessing the usability of products
- Training departments and teams to adhere to policies
- Ensuring that final products comply with customers’ specifications and are safe
- Ensuring that the process of manufacturing is thorough enough to make the products have the desired effects.
- Recording data of products produced to keep the records in check for proper assessment and documentation for the company
- Delegating duties to the design teams and manufacturers and ensuring that the stakeholders’ and customers’ concerns are met.
- Identifying and understanding the problems of equipment and developing measures to fix them and ensure the maintenance of quality standards.
- Establishing, practising, and preserving excellent management systems
- Developing measures for carrying out the process of producing quality products and setting goals for each stage of the production process.
- Observing preventive measures to reduce the breakdown of equipment and the incidences of future risks.
- Working directly with producers of raw materials to ensure that the materials are supplied on time, and that they all meet the standard quality of the company.
- Inspecting materials supplied to confirm their durability and defects if any.
- Attending to the feedback of customers to identify the flaws of the company and settle the issues and concerns of the customers.
- Supervising the level of training of the employees and sanctioning them when necessary in cases of default
- Staying updated with the newly added legal requirements every manufactured product must meet and ensuring that the products the company produces are not outside these standards.
- Developing quality reports, analyzing the inner and outer features of the products produced
- Setting guidelines on how to service equipment before use
- Making audits based on demand
- Performing consistent uniform tests on equipment daily, before the commencement of work, to identify potential faults and ways to fix them
- Reviewing current blueprints
- Working with other team members to improve products and deliver quality to maximize customers’ satisfaction
- Mapping out value streams
- Developing inspection plans and roster
- Overseeing and monitoring the test and verification of software configuration, and other codes
- Ensuring quality maintenance of software
Details of What a Quality Engineer Does
- Management and leadership
Quality engineers take charge of the overall management of the process of production. They also act as team leads overseeing other departments and teams.
They also manage the quality control and planning tools used in production.
- Product and process design
They develop the designs of products to be made and the processes to be adhered to.
- Design verification
Asides from giving design inputs and reviews, they also verify the designs for each product before production commences. In a case where the designs don’t meet the company’s standard, other designs are developed.
- Product and process control
Quality engineers are the major controllers of the processes of production, and the products produced. Also, they undertake corrective and preventive actions to reduce incidences of risk.
- Statistical process control (SPC)
They take intensive documentation of all the processes beginning from the supply of raw materials to the delivery of products to customers.
They take stock, consider returns and issue salaries to teams and lower departments.
Qualifications
- Education
To qualify as a quality engineer, you need to have obtained an Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree in Quality Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or any other similar course.
If you choose to apply for higher quality engineering roles, you will need to have a Master’s Degree in Quality Assurance.
- Training
While some quality engineers participate in internships while taking their Bachelor’s Degree programs, others wait till they are done with their studies. However, participating in internships gives you practical experience in the basics of quality engineering and helps you to build professional networks.
Also, some employees organize seminars and training for entry-level quality engineers to intimate them on the methods and knowledge of business required of them.
- Certifications
Having a Certified Quality Engineer certification proves your expertise to both present and future employers. To qualify for this certificate, you have to have completed a Bachelor’s Degree program and passed an examination administered by the body governing quality engineers.
Most importantly, you need to renew the certificate at least once every three years.
Essential Skills
A productive quality designer needs a strong mix of hard and in-depth skills to effectively carry out his job specifications. The most significant skills are:
- Correspondence
Quality architects invest a lot of energy in speaking with colleagues, providers, clients, and the board. Possessing composed and verbal relational skills are fundamental for quality engineers to perform tasks assigned to them. They likewise need to communicate complex ideas in non-specialized terms so individuals with no education in quality engineering can understand them.
- Meticulousness
One of the main parts of the occupation is making and carrying out quality frameworks and norms while recognizing existing or possible blemishes in current frameworks.
A quality architect should see each important detail and act in a like manner.
- Decisive reasoning
Recognizing defects in the association’s draft projects is one significant skill. However, fixing those imperfections and working on the general nature of the organization’s items require amazing decisive reasoning skills.
- Cooperation
A quality engineer regularly functions as a member of a group, so they could work together with other colleagues. Additionally, they are part of associations with different offices and positions, so cooperation and teamwork are vital.
- Numerical abilities
Quality designers accumulate and decipher complex insights to make and keep up with norms and rules. They ought to have a decent comprehension of various numerical ideas and mathematical expressions.
- Innovativeness
The issues a quality engineer analyses are most difficult and with no clear arrangement. A good quality engineer should be inventive to develop innovative methods of dealing with these issues.
- PC abilities
As a quality architect, you want to continually investigate and make reports, so skills on how to use a PC are fundamental. Knowledge on how to use Microsoft Word is vital for long term tasks
- Using time productively
Given the numerous perplexing tasks that a quality specialist should perform every day, time-usage skills are significant. The capacity to design your timetable and focus on your tasks is useful to help you meet both short and long-haul targets.
How to Become a Quality Engineer
- Stage 1: Get Experience Required for Certified Quality Engineer Certification
Upcoming quality engineers should have the accompanying experience for Certified Quality Engineer Certification
Applicants should have a minimum of eight years of experience as a Certified Quality Engineer.
Taking post-schooling programs reduces the number of years competitors need to meet up with you. Having recognition from a specialized school degree lessens the eight-year experience prerequisite by one year. Having a partner’s certification lessens it by two years, and having a four-year college education decreases it by four years.
An expert’s or a doctorate’s certifications reduce the experience prerequisite by five years.
- Stage 2: Apply for the Exam and Become a Member of Certified Quality Engineers
Could it be said that you are prepared to apply for the CQE test? Prepare yourself, gather the necessary information and sit for the exams.
Meet the standard score and get certified.
- Stage 3: Prepare for the CQE Certification Exam
The assessment for the Certified Quality Engineers centers on subjects relating to quality designing. These themes are reported in the association’s Quality Engineer Handbook. The handbook contains a rundown of sources that were utilized to make the test, the quality system, item and process design, quantitative management, and improvement of quantitative methods
- Stage 4: Take the Exam
After getting ready for the test, you can pick a test date and apply to go to the test. You can apply for the test on the web, take the test and submit it to the appropriate body.
To finish the assessment and become affirmed, you have to score nothing less than the standard pass mark.
- Stage 5: Recertification
CQE accreditation should be recharged at regular intervals to guarantee that you keep up with a similar degree of the information shown in your first test.
To become recertified, CQE’s should acquire 18 recertification units within three years or retake the confirmation test toward the end of the three years recertification period. Recertification units can be procured by completing exercises like directing courses or working in the field.
In sum, becoming an expert places you above your competitors. Asides from that, in-depth knowledge of the requirements of a quality engineer and application of same are important.
Where to Work
Organizations in different enterprises employ quality designers to improve the services in the workplace.
Most times, they work in assembling industries or research facilities, enforcing quality item principles, and carrying out product cycle production.
Some workplaces, like assembling offices, are prone to dangers, so the quality engineers need to wear defensive gear such as hand gloves, protective caps, or steel-toed boots.
In some organizations, quality engineers represent the company and relate directly with key personnel, while others invest a greater amount of their energy and time composing reports and accessing a lot of information.
Quality designers normally work all day. However, their work hours differ depending on the organization. Assuming a quality engineer works for an assembling industry that stays open all the days of the week, they might have just night or end-of-the-week shifts.
Quality Engineer Salary
Quality engineers are paid over $30 hourly. In some countries, they are paid between $21 to $65 per hour