Darryl Seland, editorial director of Quality, and Michelle Bangert, managing editor of Quality, discuss the results and provide analysis for the annual State of the Profession Survey.

Darryl: We recently completed our State of the Profession Survey, and along with Michelle's article for our July issue, we are here to talk a little more about the results, the good as well as the concerns that were expressed about the current state of quality and moving forward.

While a great majority of respondents are satisfied with their job and their salary with another great majority having received a pay raise since last year and expecting the same after their next performance review as well, there are still some concerns, including the skilled labor gap, supply chain disruptions, management support, and inflation's effect on budgets and innovation.

So Michelle, let's start with skilled labor.

Michelle: So every year, this is a concern. So it's kind of continues and year after year audiences mentioned the skilled labor shortages.

And even though it's been a concern for a long time, it's not really getting better. One person from the Survey wrote, “It's not getting better, but instead it's growing.” And in many cases, they also can hold a business back.

The labor issues, one another person said, “We're growing steadily and we have to grow our workforce, but it's hard to find workers who want to work on this type of job.” So they're really struggling. And even though the business is doing well, they have trouble with the labor issues. And so even though there are so many things going on with education, various associations are working on getting new populations involved and other things.

But it does take a while, one person said, “Replacing older and experienced workers with new workers is not an overnight process.” So we'll see how long it takes for some of these things to actually help the industry.

Darryl: As you alluded to, we cover, and have covered, this issue for quite some time and recently. So I would encourage people to check out that coverage of the skilled labor market or the next generation workforce here at Quality. And although COVID is less of a concern, as you kind of mentioned in the top of your article, one of the remaining impacts from the pandemic is supply chain concerns?

Michelle: Yes, definitely. So we've been hearing about supply chain issues for a long time. I still remember a company a few years ago telling me for an article, they were getting folded lead times of 52 weeks. So that's a year. So, obviously, that makes it challenging to do work and use the same suppliers and kind of source things differently. So they were able to pivot and adjust, but it still sounded very And in our survey, another person said that the raw materials used in our manufacturing can be difficult to procure at times. So depending on the industry, there's a lot of other kind of challenges going on. So fingers crossed, things turn a corner, but right now it's still a concern for our audience.