Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a quality assurance head of department and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
The Quality Assurance Head of Department plays a very crucial role by overseeing all the quality assurance rules within an organization are strictly adhered to and ensuring all the products meet a certain standard of quality. This position plans, directs, coordinates and oversees the quality assurance programs and control policies.
The primary responsibilities include developing and monitoring all the quality control programs in the organization, administering quality assurance management systems, evaluating and improving the quality control processes, identifying errors and areas of improvement, defining quality control policies, analyzing specifications and statistical data, continuously improving upon Quality Control processes, scheduling equipment testing and maintenance, ensuring all the equipment in production is working properly.
Core Skills Required to be a Quality Assurance Head of Department
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A quality assurance head of department should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Knowledge of Company Processes:
Knowledge of Company Processes is the in-depth understanding of a collection of related, structured activities that serve a particular goal for a group of customers or clients who are valuable to the enterprise.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department ought to maintain consistency across the daily processed while keeping a keen eye on the overall plan of the organization by ensuring the company processes are performed and followed.
Motivating others:
Motivating is using persuasion, incentives and mental or physical stimulants to influence the way people think or behave individually or in groups.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department ought to learn how to tap into the employee's enthusiasm as well as motivate the staff not just with money but with a motivation that comes through the daily relationship with each employee and creating an environment that fosters employee engagement and motivation.
Decision Making:
Decision Making is the art of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information and assessing alternative resolutions before settling on one.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department cannot afford to make poor decisions, that's why he ought to develop a systematic approach to decision making that allows him to make every decision with skill, confidence, and wisdom producing a final choice of competence in the workplace.
Giving Feedback:
Giving Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop employees and improve performance through honest feedback of the work done best and areas that need improvement.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department should be skilled in giving out both praise and criticism in a wise way to occasionally show workers where they need to improve and providing them with an observer's insight into the progress of their performance.
Leadership Skills:
Leadership Skills are soft skills that assist leaders in positively interacting with employees or team members to make the workplace a great place.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department must be able to lead effectively by learning how to deal with all types of people in a way that motivates, enthuse and build respect in a bid to understand and develop his leadership skills.
Monitoring Others:
Monitoring others is tracking employee activities monitor the worker engagement with the workplace-related tasks.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department should always monitor his workers to measure productivity, track attendance, incoming and outgoing phone calls, safety spying, employee theft, employee's location, horseplay and collect proof of hours worked using the latest computer detective monitoring system that provides accurate data that cannot be debated.
Role Awareness:
Role Awareness is the ability to be informed of your role in a given environment as well as understand the expectations placed on a position and to see how they are met apparently.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department must assess, measure and quantify his employee's awareness of their roles to see if they are transparent about what is required of each of them and review what kind of results they are delivering from their understanding.
Seeing Potential Problems:
Seeing Potential Problems is the ability to structure the current situations and identify developments that could cause problems in the future.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department needs to see potential problems before they occur and work to stop them early enough, he also has to stay ahead of the flow not to be caught you by upcoming issues that could be easily prevented if they were noted soon enough.
Deadlines - On time:
Deadlines - On time is the ability to prioritize the important tasks and setting up a plan on how to work on them first to deliver within the set period.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department must have the art of managing deadlines by being able to prioritize the work that is set for scheduling to the workers according to how vital the projects are and how soon they need to be executed and submitted.
Knowledge Management:
Knowledge Management is the ability to manage knowledge and information that is presented to the company from different sources without overlooking any of them.
A Quality Assurance Head of Department ought to creatively channel all the new information, tools, input, and methodology mean by actively practicing the art of knowledge management within the business by harnessing the organization's inherent wisdom's platform in one place.
Hard Skills Required to be a Quality Assurance Head of Department
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A quality assurance head of department should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.