The importance of the Profession Map

Roxann Dawson explores the significance of the Profession Map in equipping modern quality leaders to meet evolving business demands.

Roxann Dawson - The Profession Map advocate

In order to become a critical asset to the leadership team, the modern quality leader needs to not only understand their ambitions, but also have a thorough awareness of the business context. The CQI’s Profession Map has been developed to ensure quality professionals are equipped to lead their organisation’s strategy, set its vision and values, and ensure a compliant culture that seeks out optimised performance through improvements.

Keeping up with a shifting landscape

The digital shift is accelerating in daily lives, organisations and industry at a rate we’ve never seen before. We’ve also witnessed a government driven environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, as society embraces sustainability in its purchasing decisions.

The Profession Map has two key aims: firstly, to embrace demands from changes in both the digital and sustainability agendas; and secondly, to take the Competency Framework to the next level by defining the generic knowledge, skills and behaviours required by the modern quality professional.

Developing the Profession Map

I was honoured when CQI approached me to support this critical work by reviewing and sharing my expertise to strengthen the framework in line with business needs and the future of the profession.

The review targeted the five elements of the framework launched in 2013, to provide detailed skills and knowledge against each element that is aligned to four assessed tiers. These tiers relate to the progressive development of the extent and depth of competence of an individual and are defined as Foundation, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert.

Profession Map Animation

Supporting professionals and organisations

The Profession Map provides a firm foundation that compliments existing organisational structures and, thereby, assists in providing a more agile, client-focused service to stakeholders. In practice, it supports a quality professional to understand the required capability needed to add value to an organisation.

A quality professional should:

understand the market, competitor, and stakeholder needs
define governance that provides clarity of business outcomes
establish the risk landscape and the effectiveness of relevant controls
assure the organisation that planned outcomes will be achieved through proportionate, appropriate assurance
focus improvement and change within appetite level, to drive business performance.

The aim is to bring strategy and quality together. The Profession Map is an enabler to business performance and growth with the modern quality professional at the centre as a valued member.

However, it is not a destination but a journey, with the ever-changing landscape of modern society coupled with Quality 4.0 and the ESG agenda posing new challenges and opportunities. Through CPD, the modern quality professional should strengthen the following areas as they progress to ‘Expert tier’ of the Profession Map:

finance / budgeting capability
risk management
strategy planning and delivery
board reporting.

The Profession Map is a valuable resource accessible to individuals and organisations to support suitable capability aligned with business strategy. With it, quality professionals and organisations will be better able to take on today’s challenges whilst taking advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities.