Quality assurance, quality control and quality engineering are cross functional region of the components of engineering and manufacturing. Quality ensured brings a smile on the face of customer. Quality assurance stands responsible for upliftment of a protocol or a set of protocols that would ultimately satisfy the customer. Quality assurance safeguards consumer’s interest by ensuring that products and services of a company are up to the mark. It also puts forward the requirements and expectations of the consumers. This also helps the company to analyse the market groove. Many companies are striving hard to get conscious about quality which they are implementing is reaching the customer’s expectations. As a result many opportunities are opening up in this sector especially in countries like India where quality standards are not much talked about. Nowadays quality control and assurance are playing important role in the corporations’ retrieval of investments. Some of the most cited quality standards are as follows: ISO 9000:2000, ISO 9000, ISO14000, BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards), PCMM, CMM (Capability Maturity Model), SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability determination), Six Sigma, and CMMI etc.

Careers opportunities in this field:
It’s mandatory for every company that they have to stick to some quality standards, quality control and assurance has evolved as a profession which is to be taken up. Many industrial experts forecast that this is just the beginning of big job revolution in nations like India. But on the other side of the coin, India lacks certification programs and training which are essential for training of candidates interested in this stream. This is the major worry on the part of India because this stream hasn’t evolved in to profession as yet. A job seeker in this sector needs to understand the norms of quality standards. The candidate aspiring to be a quality control professional is expected to be well versed in the timely changes brought in development and implementations of quality control systems, supervision and analysis procedures. Statistical methods should be preferred by the quality control professional to audit inappropriate quality preservation modules and also should rectify them efficiently. Constant efforts should be made so as to reduce production faults which also hamper the quality standard.

Skills essential for being successful:
For being successful, a quality control/assurance professional must persist with the prescribed skills like Process control techniques, Plan, Technology transition, Analyzing process and documents, Software engineering practices and relevant methods, manage and to frequently monitor software processes, Process modelling, strictly following quality control guidelines. Apart from these decent knowledge over tools and commodities used by the enterprise is a must. There is a lot of scope in this sector. Career opportunities in this field are in plenty and are promising as well. The pay package depends on the size of the enterprise. A professional all the above mentioned skills can easily break through to the top in quick time.