At NQA we realise our Assessors are the main face of the company for our clients, and therefore the major influencing factor in our customers’ satisfaction. We invest very heavily in our Assessor recruitment, training and CPD requirements, to ensure customer satisfaction and delight from every audit.

We expect our Assessors to deliver value added audits, not just ‘tick-box‘ exercises, which truly lead and encourage our clients to realise real and tangible benefits from, and improvements in, their management systems.

We recruit our Assessors from sources which ensure the very best knowledge of our clients’ industry and management systems, primarily recruitment directly from industry and from the military. Our Assessors undergo a long period of training before they ever find themselves conducting an assessment. Our minimum standards for competence and for softer, personal skills are amongst the most demanding in our industry, thereby ensuring only a suitably experienced, knowledgeable and personable Assessor will be allocated to each client, dependent on their skills match to the clients’ requirements and on their own industry experience.

Our minimum competency requirements far exceed the minimum expected of our regulator, UKAS. For example, all of our Assessors are not only required to have completed the relevant Lead Auditors’ course, our ISO 45001 Assessors must have a minimum NEBOSH qualification, our ISO 27001 Assessors must have demonstrable and long work experience in Information Technology and Information Security roles. All of our Assessors go through continued professional development throughout the year, focussed on technical competency improvements and softer skills improvements.

At NQA we truly understand that our clients deserve value for money from their Assessments and we aim for every Assessor to deliver a value adding, pragmatic, system-enhancing audit, which helps all of our clients to achieve their aim of continual performance improvement. We believe the Assessment is about NQA delivering much more than just the certificate on the wall.  

Our client satisfaction scores reflect our success in achieving this. NQA Assessors lead the Certification industry in client satisfaction. We measure this via six key performance indicators, drawn directly from our clients in relation to their experience of the Assessment. In 2019, 83% of our clients stated that they ‘strongly agreed’ with all six key measures, with 13% stating that they ‘agreed’. This leaves room for improvement, and our recruitment and training programmes for our Assessors in 2020 will further enhance our client experience.       

Why not take a look at our 60 seconds blog series, to find out more about indivduals day-today roles within NQA, from an Assessor to a member of the Marketing team.