Quality Assurance Analyst Job Description
Quality assurance analysts use automated and manual tests to monitor all aspects of business activities. The quality assurance analyst works with business units to ensure that systems work as expected and that processes make sense and proceed efficiently. Working with IT areas, quality assurance analysts work to maintain system efficiency and resolve issues before more costly incidents occur.
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Function
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The ultimate goal of the quality assurance analyst centers on ensuring that the system or project remains useful and provides the intended services. Quality assurance analysts track processes and activities and attempt to preemptively identify issues. They perform research to determine whether incidents occur due to system or user issues. They file system issues with the IT area via incident reports or incident tickets and track them in an incident database; they devise new processes and recommended them to management for user issues.
Significance
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Quality assurance analysts ensure that a company's data, system, products and company processes consistently meet or surpass industry standards. Continuously monitoring company activities, quality assurance analysts guard a company from experiencing business and financial losses and embarrassment due to poor system performance, ineffectual internal processes and mediocre products.
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Education and Experience
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Employers on the major job boards seek candidates with at least a bachelor's degree with concentrations in computer science and computer engineering. they also recruit candidates with concentrations in other areas who have IT development or testing experience. According to Computer World, companies often seek software developers with business collaboration experience. Tech Republic states that certifications are always an asset, and if you choose to certify your skills, certify your core competencies first. Certifications such as the Certified Software Quality Assurance (CSQA) certification may boost your quality assurance analyst career.
Salary
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As of 2010, Payscale.com states that median salaries for quality assurance analyst range between $40,195 and $60,450. Quality assurance analysts typically transition from customer service, administrative assistant or other quality assurance positions to their current quality assurance positions. Later quality assurance analysts move on to more senior quality assurance positions such as senior quality assurance engineer, wherein they can expect to receive median salaries of about $67,560 to $94,040.
Job Outlook
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The United States Department of Labor groups quality assurance analysts with computer system analysts and projects an excellent job outlook for this group with an expected employment growth of 20 percent between 2008 and 2018. According to Computer World, the IT environment will grow ever more complex, and IT management in 2010 must update the technologies used to maintain and optimize new technologies. While offshore outsourcing may temper growth for some information systems positions, quality assurance analysts with a high level of expertise may be shielded from the outsourcing job losses.
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References
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- Photo Credit only quality!bearings image by Sergey Goruppa from Fotolia.com
