Brain drain in the Quality department

Brain drain in the QA department

Wikipedia: Brain drain is the phenomenon whereby highly educated people leave to look for a job elsewhere.

The past 2 years I have been working on the internationalization of iMIS Food. Together with (graduate) students from Hogeschool Van Hall Larenstein – VHL University of Applied Sciences University, the system has been given a multilingual setup and iMIS Food is now available in Dutch, English, French and German. In addition, QAssurance now has a partnership program, with which iMIS Food is implemented, supported and further developed per country with local partners. nuTIQ is our first partner for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, AGREA Agricultural Systems is approaching the market in the Philippines and Foodstep, a spin-off of Hollanda FairFoods, is helping us in East Africa.

iMIS Food System

Now that this is all in place, I can again focus on implementing iMIS Food systems in the Netherlands. Collaborating with food companies provides the best input for the further development of iMIS Food, and also gives a good feeling with the operational issues in Food Safety. What strikes me and worries me is that in the past two years many experienced QA managers have retired, or have chosen another step in their career. Combined with the increasingly complex QA function, this has led to even more scarcity on the labor mark

Brain drain and recruitment

Recruitment agencies have become even busier as a result, but often do not have the substantive knowledge to judge whether a candidate is suitable. Based on a little experience in a QA department, a QC employee can quickly make a career as a QC manager and QA manager. Everyone is happy again, until six months later it turns out that the QA system no longer functions as before.

Food Safety Scorecard

With our online Food Safety Compliance Scorecard, it is easy to test whether someone is substantively suitable as a QA manager. Just fill in the scorecard together and ask for each question how the person has arranged things at their current company and what it will look like if you start working together. If the candidate does not have a good command of the English language, this also says something about the level.

Also call the owner/manager of the company prior to the current company where the candidate works, about how the candidate left the QA department and is suitable as a QA manager. We may also conduct an assessment of the candidate together via Zoom the Room: https://lnkd.in/erDKvDKq

With iMIS Food, less level of knowledge is required in the QA department and a QC manager, with additional support from our iMIS Food Helpdesk, can successfully fulfill the job of QA manager in many cases.