Certified Quality Engineer, often abbreviated CQE, is a certification given by the American Society for Quality. These engineers are professionally educated in quality engineering and quality control.
Contents
They are trained in researching and preventing unnecessary costs through lack of quality, lost production costs, lost market share due to poor quality, etc. They possess the knowledge needed to set up quality control circles, assess potential quality risks, and evaluate human factors and natural process variation.
Scope
A partial course syllabus is as follows:
Techniques
Some techniques that Quality Engineers use in quality engineering/assurance include:
Applications
These techniques are applicable company/system wide and are, by definition, not only developed for manufacturing processes. Examples include:
Professional institutes
There are professional institutes, most notably the American Society for Quality, that examine the candidates before they are awarded an official certificate. This process helps to establish and maintain a minimum body of knowledge and skill level among certified engineers.
The Certified Quality Engineer exam is administered by the ASQ twice yearly at numerous locations around the country, and to some extent internationally. The exam changes from test to test in minor detail and the body of knowledge is revised and updated by peer review committees set up by the ASQ. The test itself consists of 160 multiple choice questions that must be answered in five hours (the number of questions and the test length may vary due to the exam being changed by the ASQ).