Quality Manager: Job Profile and Role

Let’s say you enjoy high-quality products and services. Let’s also say that you have already voiced feedback hinting at the fact that your favourite products could do with the odd improvement. This, for now, makes you the “complaining customer”. It could also mean that you are perfect for the job of the person dealing with your feedback: a quality manager.

Find out in the following blog if you have everything it takes to work in this fascinating and challenging career. You get all the information you need on the required skills and qualifications, your potential employers and what they pay you, and what a typical day in the life of a quality manager in the UK looks like. Moreover, you get valuable tips for thriving in this profession. 

Short Summary

• As a quality manager, you are responsible for quality assurance and control of the products and services your company offers.
• As a quality manager, you need to handle customer feedback and complaints which enable you to develop satisfying customer service standards.
• As a quality manager, you are responsible for optimising processes and procedures that ensure high quality and standards for your company’s products and services.

Job description

Being a quality manager in the UK means that you are the main person responsible for the high quality of your company’s products and services. To ensure this, you need to work with customer feedback and complaints since these insights help you improve processes and procedures to ensure the highest standards. You are also responsible for developing and implementing customer service standards and ensuring that your suppliers provide you with high-quality products that you then sell. Furthermore, another one of your jobs is to develop and implement so-called QMS, quality management systems.

Responsibilities

• Documentation/Record Keeping
• Developing/Implementing QMS
• Customer Complaint Handling
• Supplier Quality Management
• Customer Service Standards
• Quality Assurance/Control
• Auditing Quality Systems
• Regulatory Compliance
• Root Cause Analysis
• Risk Management

Different types of Quality Managers

• Process Improvement Manager
• Quality Assurance Manager
• Testing/Validation Manager
• Supplier Quality Manager
• Quality Control Manager

Salary

For a starting salary in UK quality management, you can expect around ￡36,000 per year. Working full-time and having relevant work experience can increase this annual salary to ￡53,000. These two factors are not the only ones that affect how much you earn. Typically, the location of your employment will affect your wages as much as your employer and even the company size.

Working hours

On average, you work between 37 and 39 a week. These hours are split into shifts, meaning that you can have both early starts/finishes and later starts/finishes. Evening work is a possibility and weekend shifts can also be a part of your weekly working hours. This mainly depends on your employer and the set-up of your working hours in your contract.

Employers

There is a range of possible employers where you can look for a job when you want to work in quality management. Among these are the following sectors: food and beverage, pharmaceutical and healthcare, manufacturing, consulting, IT, technology, telecommunications, retail, and energy and utilities. Due to the variety of options, we recommend that you define your interests first so that you can find your perfect job.

Qualifications

You have these options to become a quality manager in the UK: doing an undergraduate degree or an apprenticeship, applying directly, or working towards the quality management role. Note that for the first two approaches, you either need GCSEs at grades 9 to 4 (A* to C) or A-Levels, typically in mathematics or technology. Moreover, you will benefit from software proficiency in QMS systems like ISOXpress, SPC software like Minitab, and compliance management software like ComplianceQuest, to name but a few.  

Skills

Working in quality management comes with a specific skill set which may still vary depending on your employer’s needs. This is why you need to check the job posts for the required competencies. Nevertheless, we are pretty sure that the following three skills are among those most potential employers are looking for.

Monitoring

The ability to monitor both your performance and that of your colleagues/team is an important competency to have when working in quality management. After all, you need to ensure that all quality standards are implemented and met. Without knowing how you and your team do, you will not be able to check if everything runs and is as it should (be). A keen eye for detail should complement this skill since it ensures you do not miss a thing.

Decision-Making

Let’s say you have a product or service that is highly popular with your end consumer. Or the opposite is the case and something is happier on the shelves than in someone’s shopping basket. In both scenarios, decision-making skills are essential. Are there ways to improve your top seller even more? Are there solutions to getting “shelf-huggers” out to the customers? It will be down to you to decide on the right course of action – therefore, you need to be someone who loves making decisions.

Analysing

Coupled with your decision-making is your ability to analyse, to be more precise, to check the overall performance of your products and services. This involves reading the relevant online data like sales figures and checking your customers’ feedback. Your insights help you to improve products/services and eliminate issues efficiently and satisfactorily.

Career Path

Your career starts with an entry-level job which can be the job of an apprentice quality manager or an assistant quality manager. More senior roles on your career ladder can include the job of a quality manager and director of quality assurance. You can also go freelance, for example, as a quality consultant.

Educational Background

Managerial positions are usually based on an undergraduate and/or a postgraduate degree. If this is an option for you, you can do a Bachelor’s degree in production management or business administration. This degree qualifies you to do a postgraduate degree. Alternatively, you can look into doing a Level 4 Quality Practitioner apprenticeship. Here, you receive both theoretical and practical knowledge and can already earn a small salary.

Entry Level

Different entry-level jobs can be your first job on the road to becoming a quality manager. Among those are the jobs of an assistant quality manager, a quality technician, or an apprentice quality manager. Even though there are no strict timelines that define the length of your work in this position, you can look into possible promotions after about one or two years.

Continuous Learning

Doing a postgraduate business, management, or quality control degree can be one option when it comes to continuous learning as a quality manager. Besides, there are various qualifications and certifications that you benefit from when working in this profession. Among these is the Certified Quality Engineer (CQE), the ILM Diploma of Leadership and Management which you can acquire from the CMIT (College of Management and IT), and the Six Sigma Certification.

The Three Qs of Quality Management

If you want to succeed in quality management, you need to adhere to the three Qs at all times: quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. To help you adhere to the Qs, you can use some of the following techniques: affinity diagrams, interrelationship diagrams, prioritisation matrices, and process decision program charts.

A Day in the Life of a Quality Manager

Your working day in quality management is filled with a multitude of tasks that naturally involve quality controls and feedback analysis. In this section, we will take a look at these two and one more tasks that will shape your working day as a quality manager.

Quality Control

This job involves multiple tasks, including reading key metrics – aka, online data like sales figures and customer feedback. Based on what you gain from said metrics, you can then advance to coming up with viable solutions. These, you brainstorm with your team which means that team meetings are another part of your working day.

Team Training

Brainstorming improvements and finding solutions are not the only things you involve your team in. As a quality manager, you can be in charge of organising or conducting quality management training. Here, you check that everyone is up-to-date with the latest quality standards and knows how to implement them, for example, when dealing with customer feedback.

Documentation

Admin work is part of your job description and essential if you want to monitor and progress your products’ performance. It can include updating quality standards based on data and feedback, and new procedural standards. By drawing up this documentation, you gain further insights into potential areas that need improvement. Keep in mind that you need to share your findings with the “higher echelons” in your company to double-check that all requirements are being met.

Tips for Thriving as a Quality Manager

Is the quality manager job already your dream job? Or would you like to advance further or start your own quality management consultancy? Whatever your ambitions, we have researched three tips that help you thrive and climb to the management position of your dreams:

• Factual decisions
• Systematic approach
• Beneficial supplier relations

Factual Decisions

When it comes to selling products and managing their quality and performance, you need to be factual in your approaches and decisions – even though it is emotions, not facts, that sell products and services. If you want to thrive in quality management, you need to bracket out these/your emotions to come to sensible decisions everyone will benefit from.

Systematic approach

A systematic approach is closely connected to your ability to make fact-based decisions. It will not help you if you approach quality management and the implementation of standards without a set plan. Instead, you need to come up with an effective and time-saving system that enables you and your team to tackle issues and improvements with almost military precision.

Beneficial Supplier Relations

Your company would not exist without its customers. It would also not exist without suppliers that provide it with products and/or services to sell. Even though a great part of your job revolves around quality control and improvement, you also need to work on beneficial and healthy supplier relations. If you want to thrive in your profession, this tip is vital for you.

Frequently Asked Questions