When you work in quality assurance you will work with a team of people including a project manager and possibly part of the design group. You will all come up with an agreed set of specifications. These will be in the form of written documentation. Each specification will be laid out as a task to verify. As a quality assurance person or tester you will verify each specification achieves the goal. Some specifications can be hundreds of pages long.
In a QA QC job you will be required to be very strong with your attention to detail. You should be good at spotting errors and anything that could be wrong. The smallest problem should be caught by your eye. Products should never pass through quality assurance with errors or this means you are not doing your job.
There are many industries that have quality assurance testers and engineers. These industries include any type of manufacturing plant, a food processing plant, web design, programming, and more. Quality assurance ensures that a business can meet the needs of a company and be successful. Quality assurance is a way of verifying total quality in customer service and other types of industries as well. You might not have a physical product the company is selling but the quality assurance may actually be on the services employees are providing to customers. Quality assurance is everywhere today and you will not have a problem finding a job. The world of employment is open to you so think about where you want to work and the industry you enjoy working in before you start looking for the right employment for you.
When you work in a QA QC job, engineer, manager, etc. you will be required to have excellent communication skills. You will be required to sit through meetings and work as a team with other members working on a project to ensure the quality is brought up to par. For example, if you are providing quality assurance on a web site and you are testing sites and finding bugs, you will log all of the bugs and also make recommendations where things can be much better. Your job is to look at the look and feel of the website and verify through all of the written specifications that the site meets all of the requirements. You will need to be able to communicate verbally and in writing.
The information you provide to the staff needs to be useful and helpful. This information will be required to improve the process and the overall product. You should not make opinionated recommendations because no one is going to ask you your opinion. Your job is testing and verifying the overall functionality and the quality and that is all. Many quality assurance specialists get themselves in a bit of trouble when they begin to offer their opinions on product improvement.
There are many different software solutions you will be required to know how to use when you work as a quality assurance engineer. There are bug tracking tools where you will type in the requirement you are checking and the error you find. You will be required to come up with the reporting of how many bugs a new software or other product has and more. Many employers expect experience with these products of at least a year before company jobs will hire you into a position. Some employers will allow you to learn the software on the job.
Knowledge of computers is important when you are performing quality assurance on websites. You will test websites on different types of browsers, different types of operating systems, with and without java, and much more. You must know the different versions of software and how to test on them. If you are a quality assurance tester working on a product that doesn't require a computer then you will not need to know any applications but maybe a good bug tracking tool.
When you are looking for a job in quality assurance it is good to be working toward a degree program, have a degree, or have a certificate. If you are good with computers you may be able to get past the educational requirement depending on the position you are looking at. There are entry level quality assurance positions you can find if you want to work in this field. However, if you want to work in management then you will need a degree and possibly an advanced degree.
Working in quality assurance company jobs is a lot of fun for some people. You will spend more time working alone than you will work with others. You will be required to spend some long hours on the job to meet deadlines also. Some positions allow employees to work from home. A QA QC job can be good for you if you can handle the responsibility of working alone and still get the job done.
