Fluor Limited

About you

I have been at Fluor working in Quality for nearly 6 years now. My current role is a Quality Assurance Specialist working for the Office Quality Manager. While on projects I am called the Project Quality Representative reporting to a Project Quality Manager.

I started getting involved in project-specific audits back in 2015, which included preparing and managing the Project Audit Plan, guiding the Discipline Auditors (technical engineering experts) during the audit process, following up on Corrective and Preventive actions.

I have also been carrying out the office level audits on the various department managers and specific internal processes e.g. Client Interview and Feedback management.

About your company

Fluor is one of the world’s largest engineering, procurement, fabrication, construction and maintenance (EPFCM) companies, providing innovative and integrated solutions to government and private sector Clients in diverse industries. For over a century, Clients have trusted Fluor to successfully, ethically and safely complete their capital projects.

Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR) is a global engineering, procurement, fabrication, construction and maintenance (EPFCM) company that designs, builds and maintains capital-efficient facilities for its Clients on six continents. For more than a century, Fluor has served our Clients by delivering innovative and integrated solutions across the globe. With headquarters in Irving, Texas, Fluor ranks No. 153 on the FORTUNE 500® list with revenue of $19.5 billion in 2017 and has more than 56,000 employees worldwide.

I am located in the UK office in Farnborough, Hampshire.

About auditing

Fluor is certfied to ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015 and currently going for the ISO 45001:2018 certification.

As part of the Quality & Continuous Performance Improvement (CPI) department I am one of the trained internal Lead Auditors. Each of us get assigned a project each which we look after from the set-up to close-out and in the meantime we work out the audit strategy, schedule, carry out the audit interviews, write the audit reports and follow up any findings which need to be actioned.

Regarding the ISO certifications for the office, I assist the Office Quality Manager in liaising with the Certification Body and organizing the external audits against the standards we are certified in. It is always interesting to see how our internal Quality Management System relates to the ISO standard requirements and how our business operations are geared towards them.

About the course

I attended the 1 day QMS ISO 9001:2015 Management Systems Foundation Training Course and then the week-long Auditor/Lead Auditor Training Course back in 2016.

At that time I was still at the initial stage of my Quality Assurance Specialist role at Fluor and moving into a role which meant carrying out audits on projects. Our Clients like to see that the Quality personnel is externally trained for the job, as it carries more weight than just the Fluor internal training courses on auditing.

About Batalas

I was looking around for a Training Provider close to my home location, Portsmouth. Then I found Batalas, which was perfect travel-wise and I soon realised the whole team from signing up to the training up until the exam results was a really wonderful bunch of professional but at the same time very friendly people. Don’t get me wrong, the week-long training was so hard! My brain was really put through it’s paces, but the quality of training was great. The tutors we had were so clear in their explanations, and the group exercises were so much fun!

About your career

I am excited for the future of Quality, with all the cool technological advancements, like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning and data mining, they offer an unprecedented insight into a wide range of applications. With all these advancements, they will yet need to be regulated and standardised, so the new generation of quality professionals needs to be onboard and get involved in applications to improve the modern business world.

It would be great to somehow be able to incorporate this into my next career development stage.

About advice to new auditors

Quality professionals work in all industries and all sectors, and they come in many guises. Some are generalists, some are specialists. Some are concerned with the delivery of products and services, while some are part of the leadership of an organisation. Some are employed in-house, while others work outside the organisations they deal with.

Today’s quality profession attracts highly skilled practitioners at the start of their careers too. For this new generation, the appeal of a career in quality is the chance to work at improving all aspects of a business.

Definitely start with the Chartered Quality Institute membership. Even just at the lowest level you will get a bunch of great benefits and help to expand your knowledge. Take advantage of their NGN (New Generation Network) for the younger quality professionals and the e-mentoring program. IRCA (International Register of Certificated Auditors) is a division of the CQI, and is the leading professional body for management system auditors – get registered with them once you complete your Lead Auditor training.

Try and have a look around at the latest careers adverts out there, this will help you to see what is typically expected of a quality professional, slightly varied depending on what industry you are aiming to get into. But many of the baseline skills are the same, over the years you are just building more specialized knowledge and experience!

About CQI IRCA Awards

It was both very humbling and amazing to be chosen as one of the three finalists at the CQI IRCA Awards. In 2017 I was in the Emerging Talent category and this year stepped up and also made it to the final in the Quality Professional in a New Project category. Being nominated as a finalist is important to me because I don’t always find it easy to describe what I do in my job. I take things for granted, as a normal part of my work, whereas people looking from the outside can tell if it is something extra special that I am doing. I proved to be worthy of a finalist spot, so it allows me to feel more proud of what I do.

The submission and judging process was easier for me this year, as it was the second time I applied. I feel I understood better what the judges were looking for, and it was useful to refer to the feedback from last year’s final.

The event itself was amazing, what a real celebratory feeling we all had on the day! I really enjoyed meeting familiar faces from the previous year’s awards and meeting new ones especially from Veeva the reception partner’s. Also it was particularly nice to see the Batalas team who helped me achieve my Lead Auditor training some years ago now, and I will forever be grateful to them, for the high quality training program and the wonderful atmosphere during the week long training! It was hard but also a lot of fun!

I would definitely recommend entering, but make sure that you have a mentor guiding you along the way with your application and gathering the best, most relevant evidence. Also as you are getting ready for the 2019 Awards make sure you follow the CQI Competency Framework and if possible have your job tasks tailored towards hitting as many development targets as possible.

Additional Comments

Quality is helping the business do things right, in a more efficient way, keeping the profits in mind, while not compromising on the quality standards, internal and external that the business set out to comply with. We are surrounded by quality in our lives, example being when you are flying away on holiday you hope everyone did the proper quality checks to make sure we safely get to our destination. There are always ways of looking at what and how we do, even in our daily activities, it’s like process improvement, except out there in the real world!