Quality Coach Career Paths

Anne-Marie Charrett -

Companies seeing the benefits of a quality coach role also need to put in place structures & career paths to help individuals, teams and management in engineering understand how this new role fits within the existing engineering structure. One element of this is creating quality coaching career paths.

Change at the best of times is hard. Clarity on quality coach career paths enables those impacted to make clear and informed decisions on the role. In addition, it provides engineering leadership structures to support career growth. Useful if you don't have a background in quality and your managing quality professionals.  

There's not a lot of data out there on career paths for quality coaches. Apart from this site, descriptions of the quality coach roles and responsibilities, even less what a career path looks like, are few and far between.  

In this article, I share my perspective on this element of quality coaching.

Quality Coach Role Levels

Let's assume that your company has a tiered progressive career path that begins at Tier 1 and goes up to say Tier 6. This tiered model applies to everyone. For example, delivery leads, engineers, designers, SREs & leadership.
In this model, the quality coach role begins at Tier 3, progressing to Tier 4, and peaking at Tier 5. Here's an example:

  • Tier 1: Not Applicable
  • Tier 2: Not Applicable
  • Tier 3: Quality Coach
  • Tier 4: Staff Quality Coach
  • Tier 5: Principal Quality Coach
  • Tier 6: Not Applicable