SC QUALITY GUILDCertified Quality Improvement Associate (CQIA)
The widest door into certification. Written for people who work in quality without the title, and examined mostly at understand and apply.
The paper carries 110 questions in total: 100 that are scored and 10 unscored pretest items that do not count toward your result.
The Quality Improvement Associate Primer is published, in two volumes. Volume 1 works the CQIA Body of Knowledge section by section. Volume 2 is practice and worked solutions.
What the CQIA examination covers
The 2020 Body of Knowledge divides into 5 sections. The question count is what each section is worth on the paper, which is not the same as how long it takes to learn.
| Section | Topic | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| I | Quality Basics | 30 |
| II | Team Basics | 16 |
| III | Improvement | 40 |
| IV | Supplier Relationship | 7 |
| V | Customer Relationship | 7 |
Section by section
I — Quality Basics
What quality means, how assurance differs from control, and the contributions of Deming, Juran, Ishikawa and Crosby kept separate — because the examination routinely offers one as a distractor for another.
II — Team Basics
Team formation, stages, roles and facilitation. The primer treats storming as necessary rather than unfortunate, and gives the structural fixes that stop one voice dominating a room.
III — Improvement
The largest section, at forty questions. Six Sigma, lean and benchmarking; brainstorming, PDCA, affinity diagrams, the cost of poor quality and internal audits; the basic improvement tools; root cause analysis and risk management. Each tool is introduced by the question it answers: a run chart preserves time order and a histogram discards it, which is why a drifting process and a stable one can produce identical histograms. The four cost-of-quality categories are taught as a trade, with external failure the most expensive place to find anything and the hardest to fully count.
IV — Supplier Relationship
Supplier selection criteria and approval, the supplier relationship and its challenges, and supplier performance measured on quality, on-time delivery and level of service.
V — Customer Relationship
Internal and external customers and their influence on products, services and processes. The voice of the customer: gathering satisfaction feedback, handling a complaint through to resolution, and quality function deployment for identifying and prioritizing needs.
Questions from the free practice test
Every item carries the reasoning, not just the answer, and none of them appears in any book. The CQIA self-assessment covers every requirement in the Body of Knowledge: choose a 20-question random sample, a quick check at half the exam's length, a full exam at its real length and section mix, or work on your weak spots.
Quality is best defined as:
- Customer delight
- Zero defects
- Conformance to requirements and fitness for use
- Excellence
The working definition combines conformance, which is checkable, with fitness for use, which is what the customer actually experiences. Excellence and delight are outcomes rather than definitions and cannot be inspected against.
A group becomes a team when:
- It meets regularly
- A leader is appointed
- Members need each other to achieve a shared outcome
- It is given a name
Interdependence makes a team, not importance or formality. Where work can be divided and the pieces do not affect each other, a team is a slower way to do it and the meetings are the evidence.
PDCA differs from DMAIC principally in that PDCA:
- Is a loop rather than a phased project
- Has no check step
- Requires statistics
- Applies only to manufacturing
PDCA cycles continuously and suits improvement without a defined problem; DMAIC is a phased project for a known problem with data available. The check step is PDCA’s discipline and it is the one most often skipped.
The practice test is free and needs no account. The CQIA test is a full self-assessment covering all 50 requirements in the current Body of Knowledge, with the reasoning on every answer, a score for every requirement and your progress over time. Or work through the primer week by week in the free six-week self study, with a check after every reading.