A Global Study on Quality Professionals

Professor Jiju Antony, Dr Michael Sony, Professor Vijaya Sunder M, and Professor Alex Douglas discuss the results of their global study on what qualifications and skills a modern-day quality professional should possess.

Modern-day organisations compete in an economic environment which is hypercompetitive, fast and truly turbulent. The Covid-19 pandemic has dented the global economy in an unprecedented scale and doing business in these conditions is a multi-fold challenge. Quality has become an even more important aspect of competitiveness and will determine how an organisation flourishes in the marketplace. An important question in such environments is how should quality management be implemented and continuously improved so that organisations can be competitive? There is debate about how quality management is viewed and implemented in many organisations. In addition, there are divergent views in regards to how the management of quality should, or can, be put into practice within organisations. In a modern-day business, an important question persists as regards to how this responsibility is organised and executed. Quality is everybody’s job, however, one of the key players for the execution of quality are designated professionals such as Quality Directors, Quality Managers and Quality Engineers. They are the main pillars responsible for quality in an organisation. Therefore, it is important to understand what qualifications and skills a modern-day quality professional should possess. A global study was conducted to answer this important question. In total, 336 quality professionals across seven continents participated depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Profiles of Quality Professionals

Percentage values

Figure 2 depicts the number of quality professionals who studied quality management as a university course. Our analysis of data revealed an interesting facet that 55% of Quality Directors, 49% of Quality Engineers and 47% of Quality Managers did not study a formal quality management module at the University.

Figure 2: Number of quality professionals who studied a formal quality management module within their university degree

A continent wide further exploration found that 57% of Quality Directors in Europe, 60% in North America and Australia and 73% in Asia did not study a formal quality management module. This is an important message to both academia and industry for close collaboration, so that academia can incorporate quality management in their undergraduate and post graduate courses, especially for both engineering and business curricula irrespective of the specific discipline. This result led us to ask an important question: if these professionals are not academically qualified in quality management, then how can they deliver the stringent needs of product and service quality for current and future customers? Further analysis revealed that 92% of Quality Directors, 80% of Quality Engineers and 91% of Quality Managers did undertake training on Quality Management. We further investigated the number of hours of training received by these professionals and it revealed that 83% of Quality Directors, 55% of Quality Engineers and 58% of Quality Managers did undertake more than 30 hours of training (nearly a week worth of training) on Quality Management. These results are quite interesting as it describes that less than 60% of quality Engineers and managers received training on QM for more than 30 hours. This is a worry for industry as it means quality managers and engineers received less than a week of training on QM but are expected to find solutions for quality related problems in organisations. An important take away message for the senior managers in organisations is to invest more on training followed by execution of quality improvement projects in their respective organisations. In order to understand the quality professionals training in Lean and Six Sigma we explored further and data is given in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Number of Quality Professionals trained on Lean Management

81% of Quality Directors, 75% of Quality Engineers and 76% of Quality Managers did undertake training on Lean management. This means that 1 in every 4 quality engineers/managers has not received any training on Lean management. This would help them to carry out waste reduction and efficiency improvement projects across the business. In terms of Six Sigma, only 63% of Quality Directors, 64% of Quality Engineers and 67% of Quality Managers did undertake training on Six Sigma, data is shown in Figure 4. This means nearly one-third of the quality professionals who participated in this survey never received any formal training on Six Sigma as a powerful problem solving methodology. The authors would argue that all quality professionals of tomorrow should undertake some form of Lean and Six Sigma training for problem solving scenarios.

Figure 4: Number of Quality Professionals trained on Six Sigma

To judge the execution status of skills of quality professionals, it is pertinent to examine the number of projects the quality professionals have carried out using Lean and Six Sigma. 18% of Quality Directors, 20% of Quality Engineers and 24 % of Quality Managers did not undertake any lean projects. This result shows that 1 in 5 quality professionals have never undertaken any Lean projects and this includes quality engineers, managers and directors. Further analysis on the number of Lean projects carried out by quality professionals revealed that Less than 20% of quality engineers and managers have been involved in more than 10 Lean projects in their organisations. In terms of Six Sigma projects, 50% of Quality Directors, 45% of Quality Engineers and 48% of Quality Managers did not undertake any Six Sigma projects. More than 60% of Quality Directors undertook training on Six Sigma, however 50% of them never put that training into practice in a Six Sigma project. In addition, 64% of Quality Engineers and 67% of Quality Managers undertook training on Six Sigma however, less than 50% of Quality Engineers and Quality Managers have never undertaken any Six Sigma project.

It is fair to conclude that half of the quality professionals never carried out Six Sigma projects after they attended the Six Sigma training. This is a waste of resources, as the focus of such training is not only to understand the subject, but deliver process improvement projects across the business. The results of this study indicate that many quality professionals working in organisations in the 21st century do not have academic qualifications and required levels of training in quality management and process excellence topics. In addition, in spite of being trained in Lean and Six Sigma, most of the quality professionals have not executed projects in their respective organisations. Perhaps it is time for all Higher Education Institutions to have a mandatory course on quality management and process excellence topics for creating better quality professionals of tomorrow. After all, you would not employ and accountant or lawyer who does not have the necessary academic qualifications deemed essential for the satisfactory conduct of their jobs.

Authors

Professor Jiju Antony, Professor of Quality Management, Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Dr Michael Sony, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Namibia

Professor Vijaya Sunder M, Assistant Professor, Operations Management at Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, India

Professor Alex Douglas, Editor, The TQM Journal, Emerald Publishing, UK