Quality practitioner (L4)

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.

1. Project Quality Engineer

• Apply quality management principles across the project lifecycle, conducting compliance checks, analysing technical data, and coordinating with engineering and delivery teams to ensure outputs meet contractual, regulatory, and organisational quality standards.

2. Quality Assurance Officer

• Implement assurance frameworks and audit processes to verify adherence to organisational, customer, and statutory quality requirements, providing evidence-based recommendations for corrective and preventive actions.

3. Quality Engineer

• Carry out inspections, monitor quality performance metrics, investigate non-conformities using root-cause analysis techniques, and implement control measures aligned with recognised quality standards and organisational policies.

4. Quality Officer

• Perform routine quality monitoring and documentation verification, ensuring operational activities comply with defined procedures, specifications, and governance requirements within the quality management system.

5. Supplier Quality Engineer

• Evaluate and monitor supplier capability and conformity through audits, inspections, and performance reviews, ensuring procured goods and services meet agreed technical specifications and regulatory obligations.

Intertek, N G Bailey, Lab corp, Wincanton-DSE, Toyota UK, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Royal Mail, BAE Systems, Ministry of Defence (MOD), Balfour Beatty

K1: Understand the organisation’s operating environment and the factors that may influence its direction and performance, including the markets it operates in, roles and responsibilities, who its stakeholders are and what they require from the organisation. This may include sustainability criteria.

K2: Understand the environment in which the organisation’s products/services are produced or supplied, and the factors that may influence performance, including legislation, customer requirements and regulatory requirements. This may include sustainability or climate change criteria.

K3: How the organisation’s strategy is sensitive to stakeholder perceptions and how this knowledge informs priorities at a tactical level. This may include sustainability, ethical, or climate change related criteria.

K4: How applicable contractual and commercial requirements for quality affect the organisation’s performance objectives for their specific products/services.

K5: The methods and tools for identifying customers/stakeholders and gathering information about their requirements, including analysing and prioritising quality requirements using tools such as the Kano model.

K6: How to convert quality requirements into performance measures and objectives using tools such as Critical to Quality Trees (CTQ Trees), requirements matrices and operational definitions.

K7: Risk and opportunity management, including principles, frameworks and processes; types of risk/opportunity associated with new product/service development, process and supply chain management; and methods/tools for identifying, assessing, mitigating risks and realising opportunities, such as risk and opportunity registers, matrices, Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA).

K8: Products/services life cycle stages (such as Capture, Design and Development, Integration, Production, Support and Closure) and their implications for quality.

K9: Concepts of process design and how this supports organisational objectives using tools such as process flowcharts, value stream mapping and SIPOC (Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer).

K10: Tools and techniques for managing the organisation’s specific products/services to meet customer requirements, such as Quality Function Deployment, Lean Product Development and Design for Manufacturing.

K11: How to plan, measure, manage and monitor the organisation’s quality objectives.

K12: Understand the purposes of auditing and how to plan, conduct, report and follow up an audit.

K13: When to apply business improvement approaches, tools and techniques such as problem definition, measurement systems analysis, basic and graphical data analysis, software tools for data analysis, root cause analysis, identification and assessment of improvement options, and process control tools.

K14: The key considerations (political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental) and approaches necessary (such as Tuckman’s Storming, Norming, Forming and Performing) to enable change in organisations, products or services.

K15: The organisation’s key internal and external drivers for change and how they influence priorities and objectives.

K16: How to promote the right behaviours to create a quality culture within the organisation and how this leads to improved organisational performance.

K17: Techniques for improving awareness and performance in relation to quality objectives and requirements.

K18: How different sources and methods support maintaining one’s professional development in the quality profession.

K19: Principles forming the foundation of Quality and Quality Management Systems.

S1: Identify, interpret and apply relevant legal, governmental or industry regulations affecting the organisation.

S2: Communicate using appropriate methods (verbal, written, visual) to influence internal and external stakeholders, applying effective questioning techniques such as open and leading questions.

S3: Identify, collect and analyse relevant quality data using appropriate tools and techniques such as Pareto analysis, statistical methods and trending analysis.

S4: Apply methods and tools to improve the quality performance of processes, products and services, such as production control plans, standardised work and failure mode and effects analysis.

S5: Identify, analyse and prioritise quality-specific risks and opportunities, and support the development, implementation and evaluation of resulting actions.

S6: Plan and conduct system, product or process audits.

S7: Assess the effectiveness of measurement systems using tools such as Measurement Systems Analysis.

S8: Identify requirements from technical documents, commercial inputs or stakeholder statements and convert them into definitions that can drive organisational processes.

S9: Identify gaps in process performance and develop improvement plans to close these gaps.

S10: Apply structured problem-solving, including identification, definition, measurement, analysis, improvement and control methods and tools.

S11: Communicate the organisation’s quality strategy across all levels of the organisation.

S12: Identify internal and external stakeholders and their current and optimal positions (such as hostile, help it work, opposed, uncooperative, indifferent, hesitant, enthusiastic support) required to support quality-related activities.

B1: Promote actively best practices and continuous improvement.

B2: Operate diligently with professionalism while considering the wider organisational context.

B3: Act with integrity by being open and honest.

B4: Always place customers at the centre of every task.

B5: Seek continuous professional development opportunities through self-reflection, information gathering, creating personal development plans and staying up to date with sector or organisational regulations.