That’s happening again, with many companies facing uncertainty and hesitant to add permanent jobs to payroll. Recent research by Gartner found that 32% of organizations are replacing full-time employees with contingent workers to keep costs in check. Employers are also increasingly considering introducing other models, like talent sharing and 80% pay for 80% work. 

“While these situations are completely different, we did see that as the recovery took hold, the engagement of external workers increased,” says Arun Srinivasan, general manager of SAP Fieldglass, a provider of vendor management solutions. “We expect the same coming out of this.”

That has presented an opportunity for the self-employed: High-end temp work. Since the pandemic started, SAP Fieldglass has noticed that about 70% of temporary positions are not getting filled. Companies that want to hire “external talent” can’t find the right people.

Although many workers would prefer full-time, traditional jobs—and temp work in some industries has been associated with a history of exploitative working conditions—there are also many well-paying part-time temporary positions available to skilled professionals. 

“We are in the midst of a transition here,” says Srinivasan. “We do see more opportunities for workers who choose to engage in that model.”

So how can independent professionals who are looking for freelance work make the most of the trend? 

Determine what type of work is right for you. Companies in some industries that have seen heightened demand in the pandemic are hiring for permanent, full-time jobs. Others are leaning more toward “off-balance-sheet” talent, because they are facing economic uncertainty in their industry. That means that even with unemployment higher than it has been for a while, there are still options across the spectrum of work arrangements, especially if you have sought-after skills and experience. 

The trend toward bringing on more temporary workers could put many self-employed professionals in demand and bring them new employment opportunities.

“This is an uncertain time,” says Srinivasan. “This is uncharted territory for organizations and workers. We’re seeing newer kinds of work and work arrangements.”

Focusing your search for work on the type of employment you really want can help you achieve better results. “From a worker’s perspective, many have a choice,” says Srinivasan. “Seeking engagement as a payroll employee is a choice they have. At the same time, there are more and more opportunities open for them to seek work through other sources. Whether they are through service companies, staffing companies or talent clouds, they will have more opportunities to do so.”

Consider a hybrid approach. Some independent workers like to combine a mix of freelance projects and temp work to ensure a steadier income. The thinking is “You can’t be too diversified in an unpredictable economy.” One benefit of temp work is that you typically get a paycheck every week for as long as a project continues. Some temp positions come with benefits, such as access to a 401(k). 

An option that’s picking up steam right now is the contract-to-hire, where workers are hired on a temporary basis for a one-year contract, after which they will be considered a permanent employee. “We have definitely seen that trend in the technology consulting sector,” says Srinivasan. 

Of course, with any flexible model like this, there is the potential for workers to be exploited. If you find that a company has brought on a lot of contract-to-hire workers in the past but ends everyone’s projects just before the one-year mark, then it probably isn’t a place where you can count on a future full-time job—and may not have a worker-friendly environment. 

Try a temp agency. This isn’t the usual way that independent workers look for projects, but it’s worth considering, given the uptick in demand for temps. The External Talent Marketplace has partnered with agencies including Adecco, Experis (part of ManpowerGroup); Guidant Global and its staffing affiliates S.Com, Corestaff and SRG; KellyOCG and Randstad US. Registering with some of them will enable you to tap into opportunities with employers seeking temps with your skill set, including jobs posted on the External Talent Marketplace. 

Will the temp trend continue? Very likely. Many companies are being very cautious about hiring right now but that doesn’t mean they don’t need contributions from top talent. “There is a gap in supply,” says Srinivasan. 

And that means independent professionals with the right skills are going to find themselves with plenty of projects. “Some employers are trying every possible way to find workers,” says Srinivasan.

Quality Assurance Checklist

No matter the size of your business, you need a quality assurance program. Even at its most basic, it should include the following:

• An Approved Supplier List

Your suppliers should undergo a vetting and testing process to make sure you can depend on them for consistent quality.

• Standard Operating Procedures

Whether your business model is for product or service, following a consistent process helps ensure a consistent end product. Even in creative fields, certain procedures must be followed to ensure quality if the end results are to stand up to close inspection.

• Ongoing Employee-Training Programs

The business landscape is changing fast, and you’ll need to keep moving to stay abreast of the competition.

• Standards for Equipment and Software

Know exactly what you need your equipment to do, from desks and chairs to the software programs you use. How do you calibrate them and make sure they’re performing up to par?

• Problem-Solving Procedures

If and when a problem comes up, how do you go about solving it? Are there dispute-resolution procedures for disagreements between staff members? What are the procedures for reporting an issue?

• Measuring Performance in Relation to the Customer

A model of what constitutes excellent customer service and how to deliver it successfully.

• Soliciting and Tracking Customer Feedback and Satisfaction

Getting customer feedback should happen as a matter of course. With a QA system, the procedure is thought-through beforehand, all your team needs to do is follow it.  

Why is There a Need for Quality Assurance in a Call Center?

Adding a quality assurance program to your customer relationship management system allows you to monitor your staff performance and make sure they keep the standards you have set. It enables you to know you’ve established the right benchmarks and changing them.

A good QA system is a necessary component of your business success, especially nowadays, when unhappy customers are just a click away from multiple social media outlets. A negative review can spread exponentially, becoming visible to thousands of people in a matter of minutes.

Related: 11 steps to handling customer complaints on social media

The whole world is watching. The need for quality assurance helps make sure they see you at your best, rather than your worst.

1. Prevent Brand and Reputation Damage

When your customers think of your brand, certain images, feelings, and expectations come into their minds. Quality assurance for your customer relationship management ensures that the association is positive.

In 2011 the telecommunications company Research in Motion (RIM), which originally designed the Blackberry, experienced an event with significant negative impact on their brand. Their email system went out for three days. Customers all over the world were inconvenienced and upset. RIM had to deal with lawsuits and canceled subscriptions, not to mention the embarrassment and black mark against their brand.

RIM’s primary and backup email systems somehow failed at the same time. A good quality assurance program could have prevented that. It maintains a set of standards, regulations and procedures everyone must follow. In customer relationship management, as in everything else, what you measure improves.

2. Maintain ISO Compliance

An International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification improves your business credibility, especially with foreign companies. Some businesses require suppliers to have up-to-date quality certificates. Even banks, investors and potential employees will see it as a sign of professionalism and stability in your company.

ISO 9001 standards require companies to set up processes to determine customer requirements. These requirements then need to be known to everyone else in your organization. Track and analyze customer satisfaction with direct relevance to customer relationship management. To meet these standards, you need to pursue customer feedback and make changes to solve any issues they might raise.

To build strong customer relationships, performance needs to be good, but — above all — it needs to be consistent. When you implement the need for quality assurance, you make a regular commitment to your customers you instill at all levels of the business. 

3. Know What Your Customers Really Want

You might think you know what your customers want, and you might be right. However, an intuitive understanding of your customers is not a good basis for investment. You can’t go to the Board or the bank and ask for money to fund programs based on intuition.

Related: 5 ways your call center can seduce millennial customers

A QA program gives you real data on what your customers want, straight from the source. You’ll be able to identify pain points in your customer journey and areas where your customer relationship management needs improvement.  

4. Promote Higher Productivity

By gathering actual real-world data on your processes, you’ll gain a clear, step-by-step idea of how they work. No more throwing money at problems and hoping they’ll go away – you’ll know exactly what needs to be done and who would be the best person or team to do it. 

5. Have Better-Functioning Teams

Once you have everything written, it’s easier to train and coach staff. You’ll know how everything works and how each team member meets, exceeds or falls short of the standard. Clearly, specific feedback makes an excellent guide to improvement. Each staff member will know exactly what they expect and how they fit into the company strategy.

With reasons for quality assurance running through your company, staff will find it easier to contribute their own ideas for process improvements and best practices.

6. More Efficient and Realistic Planning

Goals are achieved when we know what steps to take and follow them consistently. It’s the same on a personal level, and a corporate level. Once the path ahead is clearly visible, it becomes easy to follow it. With the data necessary to evaluate the status of your projects, you can predict the completion timeframe, and be able to do damage control if a project should run off the rails.

The need for a quality assurance program might seem expensive and time-consuming, but can you afford not to do it? Call us today 734-548-8313

A Quality Engineer works within the quality team to ensure the overall quality of a manufactured product and is tasked with creating documentation, devising quality tests and defining the criteria a test result should meet. They play a key role in fixing issues when they arise.

Some Companies might call this role:

• QA Engineer
• QC Engineer

Quality Engineers work within a wider team of professionals with the overall aim of making sure that the final products are safe, reliable and meet customer expectations while keeping the manufacturing process as effective and cost-efficient as possible.

Quality Engineers work with various stakeholders, at every part of the manufacturing process such as;

• Design teams – testing to identify product durability and areas of weakness
• Suppliers – working to ensure raw materials and component parts meet the company’s quality standards
• Manufacturing teams – ensuring that equipment and processes follow predetermined quality standards
• Customers – analyzing issues reported via customer feedback, maintaining records and implementing changes to manufacturing when necessary

Quality Engineers are often tasked with the creation of quality practices and documentation for a given product or facility.

They set out appropriate tests and acceptable result parameters to ensure that quality testing throughout the manufacturing process is effective.

Even at the point of troubleshooting, quality engineering is about more than just identifying problems – it’s about understanding the underlying issues and developing successful fixes, changing practices where necessary to ensure that standards are maintained.

What Does a Quality Engineer Do?

The role of a Quality Engineer can vary greatly between companies.

In larger manufacturing operations, quality engineers can have a specific focus or area of expertise such as Quality Assurance,  Quality Control, Six Sigma or even Reliability Engineering.

Quality Assurance
– is process oriented and focuses on eliminating process variation by creating, revising and strictly implementing a set of tightly and precisely defined process/procedures/quality standards that when exactly followed, ensure the final quality of the product. Quality Assurance is preventative by nature.

Quality Assurance is typically reflected on the factory floor through the use of a Quality Management System (QMS). A QMS is a formalized system that documents processes, procedures, and responsibilities for achieving quality policies and objectives. It helps coordinate and direct an organization’s activities to meet customer and regulatory requirements.

ISO 9001:2015 is the most recognised and widely implemented quality management system. Other techniques and methodologies used in Quality Assurance. Total Quality Control and Total Quality Management.

Quality Control
– is product-oriented and focuses on testing a sample of a manufacturing process to make sure that it meets the required design specifications or quality standards. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, the sample testing is done in a laboratory so people who work in QC usually generally (but not always) have a science/laboratory background.

100% sampling or Statistical Process Control (SPC) are some of the more widely used techniques in quality control.

Six Sigma
– is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement developed by Motorola and gained industry-wide acceptance after it was championed by Jack Welch at General Electric. It aims to improve the output quality of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes.

Reliability Engineering
– uses engineering techniques and analysis to improve the dependability or reliability of a product, process, or system in order to:

• Prevent or to reduce the likelihood or frequency of failures
• Identify and correct the causes of failures that do occur despite the efforts to prevent them
• Determine ways of coping with failures that do occur, if their causes have not been corrected
• Apply methods for estimating the reliability of new designs

In smaller operations, Quality Engineers can be tasked with a much wider remit of responsibilities, providing quality engineering support to the whole system.

Whatever the specific set up, Quality Engineers are working to ensure that manufacturing processes and ultimately, final products, meet both internal and external quality standards.

Based within the manufacturing facility, Quality Engineers can work on the manufacturing floor, in an office, or in a lab – depending on the specific tasks they are carrying out at the time.

As previously mentioned, the specific duties of a Quality Engineer will vary from company to company. But as examples, they can include:

• Creation of quality documentation and development of SOPs for their facility and products in line with industry standards
• Proactive review and improvement of systems and processes to ensure the maintenance of standards
• Maintaining accurate quality documentation
• Working closely with manufacturing staff to ensure quality protocols are followed and documentation is correctly maintained and implement any new changes or adaptations based on a quality review
• Inspection and testing of various parts of manufacturing including products, components, processes, and comparing against predefined standards
• Ensuring safety requirements are met at every point in the manufacturing facility
• Analysing problems reported and developing improvements to overcome them
• Oversight of junior quality team members
• Statistical analysis of manufacturing data and creation of reports for senior staff members based on quality documentation
• Working closely with external partners e.g. suppliers, customers, etc
• Continuous improvement in the manufacturing process

Becoming a Quality Engineer

An associate’s degree in quality engineering with relevant experience is enough to secure an entry-level role.

For lots of industries though, you generally need a high level and deep understanding of the manufacturing process to perform the role of a quality engineer. And so for that reason, a Bachelor’s Degree in a lab/science or engineering discipline such a mechanical, industrial, production, manufacturing engineering is the typical minimum requirement for quality engineering. The techniques used in quality engineering are usually added onto a lab/science or engineering qualification or learnt on the job.

There are plenty of exceptions though and it’s not uncommon for smart production operators, toolmakers or technicians (with further education) to progress to the role of a quality engineer.

A master’s degree in quality assurance is desirable for advancement to management positions.

If you already work as a quality engineer and would like to retrain to perform the same or similar role within the pharmaceutical or medical device industry, check out our 30-week Certificate in BioPharmaChem conversion program. The program is delivered online and is university accredited by Technological University Dublin, Ireland

What Skills Do I Need?

The ideal skill set for someone moving into a quality engineering role includes:

• Analytical skills – need to be able to spot problems quickly and find the underlying causes so changes can be made
• Critical thinking – once problems are identified, solutions and improvements must be found. This might involve thinking about a process, procedure or problem in a completely new way.
• Attention to detail – as the people responsible for the creation and implementation of quality systems, as well as the people who notice and report on problems, every detail must be noticed and acted upon when necessary
• Numerical skills – statistical analysis can be a big part of a quality engineering role
• Communications skills – strong written and verbal communication skills are key. Must be able to relay potentially complex ideas to a wide range of audiences – both in personal consultations but also through company SOPs and quality documentation
• Team working skills – working as part of the quality team, and in close coordination with other teams throughout the manufacturing facility (as well as potential for interaction with suppliers and customers) is a key part of quality engineering