Developing, challenging and engaging quality talent

How to engage quality professionals and develop their skills was the topic for the CQI’s sixth Corporate Connect event of the year, ‘Wider Horizons – Developing, Challenging and Engaging Quality Talent’.

Dr Barbara Savage, HPE Client Manager and Course Leader at the University of Portsmouth, Paul Maguire, former Director for Quality at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Sampath Sreevathsan, Lean Six Sigma Lead for the EMEA region at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, were the speakers for the day. One of the most prominent issues organisations are facing today is the difficulty in retaining quality talent, hence during the event the speakers explored how to provide future quality leaders with more strategic capabilities, and how organisations can capitalise on opportunities to capture and transfer value from academic research in quality and access industry best practices. They also focused on how to develop a robust quality career path and promote talent engagement and retention of quality professionals.

Speaking to CQI’s Content Executive Alicia Dimas after the event, Sreevathsan said the main learnings he would like attendees to take home from the event are how to align employees to key strategy priorities, how to develop employees’ skills, and the role universities can play in the development of these skills.

Dr Barbara Savage said: “Academic learning can have a key impact on transferable knowledge and skills for quality specialists, so that they can actually improve their impact on businesses.”

She added: “An open and inquiring mind, to accept unlikely opportunities will be the most important characteristic for the quality professionals of tomorrow.”

Spencer Hollands, Project Quality Manager for Flour, who attended the event, said he realised that “everyone has the same challenges, and everyone is looking for solutions and answers to these challenges. The networking part of the event allows us to share ideas that we can implement in our own organisation, learning lessons from the successes and failures of other people.”