Platform for the food and beverage industry
More and more food companies are experiencing difficulties attracting or, at the very least, keeping the right QA staff. As vacancies open, not only is the focus on quality and food safety in danger of waning, but the gap that potential candidates must bridge at the outset is also growing. "There is an urgent need to invest in QA personnel," echoes KTBA. Although managing director Kobe van Looy and regional managers Lien Thoen and Valerie Vanhove are not necessarily talking about financial compensation in this regard.
A veritable war on talent is raging. After all, there are not many potential candidates for a QA position, while the need for those profiles is just steadily increasing under the influence of stricter standards. "As a result, the pressure on both food companies and staff is increasing," said Kobe van Looy. "If employees do not find sufficient support from their employer in this, they will quickly seek other places. Ultimately, this is how we end up in a vicious circle." To break the downward spiral of staff shortages, KTBA sees several possibilities. Both its own commitment and that of the industry is decisive.
Van Looy starts at the basics. "Students are insufficiently aware of what exactly a QA manager does. More to the point, in a lot of relevant courses it is simply not talked about enough. Students do not know that it is part of the job, and those who do know often have a distorted view. They think, for example, that it is a purely theoretical profession." "Completely unjustified," agrees Lien Thoen, "because as a QA manager you have two feet in the field. You get a lot of responsibility and there is a lot of variety. Anyone who does an internship in a quality department notices this immediately. That's why we urge food companies to sign up for internships as much as possible."
However, a higher education course is only the beginning. Thoen: "The quality requirements in the food sector are so strict and multifaceted that a QA manager needs a lot of knowledge and skills. He needs to be a jack-of-all-trades, so to speak, who knows about food safety as well as sustainability, labeling and digitalization. Not to mention the inherent changeability of all those standards." Anyone who wants to evolve with the market, therefore, has no choice but to update their knowledge regularly. "Unfortunately, very few QA managers are effectively given the opportunity to do so. It's up to food companies to make room for that and invest in training for their staff."
Yet there is no such thing as the complete QA manager. Van Looy: "There is no point in looking for someone who has all this specialized knowledge. There is no such person. But you also don't need all that knowledge every day. Sometimes it suffices to get notification and support when something actually changes. That is the task of our knowledge center, for example, so that the QA manager himself can remain on the shop floor." "In addition, we are making more and more tools available to increase efficiency in the field," Thoen adds. "Think of digital inspection reports and databases. Such things quickly save a QA manager a lot of typing and research and thus again relieve the pressure on his shoulders."
Does the QA manager fall away anyway and the vacancy is not immediately filled? Then, according to Valerie Vanhove, the most important thing is to ensure continuity. "If you leave the tasks, then not only safety and quality are compromised, but in many cases you also build up a backlog. For a new employee this is not an optimal start, and when the gap is too big you run the risk of him dropping out." Shifting responsibility temporarily to other staff members doesn't make sense either. "On the one hand, because they often don't have the right knowledge, and on the other, because the workload increases again this way. Then it's better to outsource the role to a specialized partner for a while. KTBA employs dozens of consultants who can be flexibly deployed in such cases and monitor everything. This way you not only take care of your current, but also your future personnel."
