Quality Assurance Resume

Quality assurance (QA) specialists are critical for guaranteeing customer satisfaction, building trust in a company’s products, and ensuring customers keep returning.

As a result, quality assurance specialists are constantly in demand, with the growth rate for software quality assurance analysts projected to be especially high between 2020 and 2030, at 22%.

Whether you specialize in physical products or software, follow our six tips to write an excellent QA resume:

1. Customize your resume to the job description

Use terminology from the job ad to make your resume applicant tracking system (ATS)–friendly. Using these terms demonstrates you have the exact type of QA expertise a hiring manager (and their vetting software) is looking for.

While quality control and quality assurance are technically different, some job descriptions use the titles interchangeably, which means you can also use both terms throughout your resume.

However, if the job title and responsibilities lean more toward quality control, emphasize your:

• attention to detail to catch defects
• knowledge of quality standards and regulations to which you test your products
• communication with the testing team

If your desired jobs fall more into quality assurance, tailor your QA resume to discuss how you:

• prevent, as much as fix, quality issues
• enact process-based systems
• collaborate with multiple teams, including the development team

2. Describe what you’d bring to the company in your resume summary

Your resume summary is a snapshot of your professional qualifications, but it should also highlight what you can contribute to the company.

As a QA specialist, you understand what makes products high quality. Make sure to know — and emphasize — the quality aspects most important to your target company and their product.

Some common quality terms to use in your resume are:

• usability
• functionality
• uniformity
• meeting safety standards
• good taste (if a food product)
• longevity

3. Place your experience section above your education

Understanding how to identify and solve QA-related problems comes from on-the-job experience. So, hiring managers for QA roles place greater importance on a candidate’s work experience than their experience in the classroom.

Catch the hiring manager’s attention right away by placing your professional experience toward the top of your resume.

Even if you’re a recent college graduate, you can discuss experiences during college where you identified and solved a quality issue. These experiences should be written out before you even list out the details of your education section. Such QA-related experiences include:

• relevant coursework
• internships
• volunteer work

4. Highlight important quality assurance skills

Give specific evidence that supports your QA-related skills where you can. To create a clearer, more compelling resume, name the exact quality assurance methodologies and frameworks you use, and use hard numbers to describe how you worked within them.

Bad Description of Skills

Used FMEA for quality assurance

Good Description of Skills

Applied Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to 30+ projects, leading the team to resolve most quality issues (~ top 20% of risk priority number scores) within the first iteration

No matter your area of quality assurance, important skills to list include:

• anticipating, identifying, and solving problems
• organization
• attention to detail
• soft skills, such as teamwork and communication skills

5. List the quality standards you know

Some common quality standards to include on your resume are:

• ISO 9001
• Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP)
• Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)
• Good Clinical Practice (GCP)

Also, show that you’re up to date with recent changes to quality standards and requirements by specifying the most recent version.

The below examples demonstrate how you might incorporate a quality standard, here ISO 9001, into different sections of your resume.

6. Proofread your resume

Your resume gives hiring managers an idea of your attention to detail and standard of work — characteristics especially important for quality assurance jobs. So be sure your resume is error-free.

To ensure you catch common resume mistakes like spelling and grammar errors, you can:

• have others review your resume
• read your resume in an unusual font so errors jump out (but remember to change it back to one of the best resume fonts before sending)
• put your resume down for awhile and pick it up with a fresh pair of eyes
• check your resume using Grammarly or other proofreading software tools