So it’s a weekly battle between how do you get into QA and what exactly do you do in QA, vying for the top spot in terms of what question Rob gets asked most. And I guess it’s fair considering most of my online community are doctors - and QA is a highly unusual thing for someone with an MBChB to be doing.
But - as it goes - I fielded this question in my inbox again this week and because it does get monotonous drafting responses (don’t get me wrong - I love engagement, but this could be templated right?) my thinking was let’s put out a piece of content answering this. Now a quickfire LinkedIn post (or blog post if I’m feeling creative this morning) will never quite capture the nuance of either of these, but I’ll try for broad strokes.
Let’s do this the wrong way around and start with what I do, rather than how I got here. The commonly held view is that QA is a very peripheral-‘sitting in a dusty corner’-drafting documents kind of job. A bit like a professional hermit. You’re important, no one knows why you’re important, and everyone knows you sign off on procedures. And PERHAPS this may have been what the profession looked like 20 years ago. Today, with AI and tech developing at such a blistering pace - as a QA human you absolutely have to be on the metaphorical company horse, cantering close behind your C-suite humans (or maybe a little ahead of them because they don’t know AI that well).
Instead of firing off an arbitrary list of bullets around what’s on my job description, let’s talk about what QA is as a vibe. The flavour of quality. Basically, you are the ‘how to person’. When people in your company, unprompted, come to you to figure out how to do things, that’s the essence of the job. You understand what other companies do; how the industry handles things and what the gold standard is. But more than that, you take the gold standard and you make it work for your company. It’s not some mechanistic copy paste exercise - where you have AI write something for you and then say to your company ‘here’s a procedure - follow it’
You need to get folks together, into a room, and take them by the hand - talk them through what you think will work, LISTEN to what they think will work, and then meet in the middle.
Now if this sounds vague - well yes, it is, because no two companies are the same and you’ll all have your own set of procedures for your own specific activities. However, the one common point is in fact that all companies want to be successful and want to figure out the best recipe for success.
And if I had to say what the greatest value proposition of a QA human to a company is - it’s this: You get to work with your teams to figure out the best way to do things, to get the best results. You literally are a part of the success blueprinting process. And I guess this comes down to mindset - because best believe there are a lot of practitioners of the quality arts who believe their job is to restrict and curtail. Where it’s actually to enable - to facilitate people doing things with less friction and more confidence.
Now that I’ve made my elevator pitch for the field, perhaps some of the more admin-esque tasks.
You draft documents. Lots. It’s never a once off exercise - when you open that template, best believe it’s a journey with every single SOP. You will sometimes be friends. You will sometimes be enemies. But you and that document are going to walk a journey together, and boy are you going to iterate.
Version control, painstaking naming conventions, and perpetually tidying up SharePoint folders that people drop files into. I would say this is by far the most under-appreciated part of the job. No one realises the sheer volume of work it takes to keep a company’s folder structure organised - nothing fancy mind you - just at the level where you can easily find whatever you need to when you need to. Many hours of my life have gone into this, and I’ve learnt some interesting lessons along the way. Lessons about how to use SharePoint and lessons on how people’s minds work.
There’s the audit side of things. While prep goes a long way towards a happy auditor, you inevitably face heat for your company as an audit lead. You’re the face that any external certifying body or auditor sees, and all feedback, good or bad, is funneled through you. I’ll try not to toot my own horn too much here, but it takes a cool disposition and someone that doesn’t take criticism personally to handle audits and reviews. The mindset should always be - how can I take what this unknown person is saying, and use it to make my company better. Because most of the time - it’s constructive.
When we get to internal audits, the misconception is that my job is catching people doing things wrong. Actually, it’s about catching systems that set people up to fail. There’s nothing like a bad employee, only bad systems (and while this may not always be true true, thinking this way makes my job infinitely easier). When someone skips a step, my first question isn’t “why didn’t you follow the process?” It’s “what made following the process such a pain that skipping it seemed reasonable?”
Some ‘I used to be a doctor’ reflection - coming from clinical medicine, I love that QA gives you the diagnostic satisfaction without the life-or-death pressure. Instead of “why is this patient deteriorating?”, it’s “why does our client onboarding process keep breaking down in week three?” You still get to play detective, just with spreadsheets instead of blood tests.
My coffee is finishing, so here are some final thoughts. We don’t sit in dusty back corners writing mind-numbing documents all day. On the contrary, we’re more plugged into what’s happening across the company than most. You become that person colleagues start asking “how should we handle this?” And honestly? You get weirdly excited about figuring out why something works brilliantly one day and crashes spectacularly the next.
If you’re someone who gets genuinely excited about making things work better - not just work - then you’re probably already doing QA work. You just don’t have the title yet.