Top Reasons to Work in Commissioning, Qualification and Validation

 

Commissioning, Qualification andValidation, acronymed as CQV, is a significant area of business that offers an interesting and gainful career boost to process and chemical engineers. In short, CQV engineering provides talented candidates with ample career growth opportunities. Keep reading to know what makes CQV an excellent career option.

 

Understanding CQV

Recent stats depict that the life sciences industry in the UK employs 248,400 professionals, which include people working in CQV as well. CQV – as an important field of life sciences – is basically a process within the pharma sector that focuses on equipment.

It helps ensures equipment, systems and facilities fulfil design requirements that are in place for end users. If a person installs any type of equipment inside a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, they require to record the process of operation and installation as well as its performance. Essentially, CQV focuses on the performance of equipment installed.  

 

Need for CQV

For apparent reasons, the pharmaceutical industry is a highly regulated sector. This means, the equipment used to manufacture pharmaceutical products must conform to predefined tests and standards that are stringent in nature.

Commissioning is a process of documentation to ensure that systems, facilities and equipment are designed and installed as per the specifications and function appropriately.

The Qualification part of CQV is product-oriented and can further be classified into three distinct components:

      ·  Installation qualification: To ensure equipment is installed as it should be

      ·  Operational qualification: To see if equipment operates as it’s expected to function

     · Performance qualification: To check if the equipment performs as it is expected to work over a specific period of time.

All in all, Qualification ensures that systems and equipment function to manufacture products correctly.  

The final component is Validation, which is a document-intensive procedure that ensures the final product is manufactured correctly. Basically a quality assurance measure, it gathers and analyses data, collected from the design phase through production.

 

People Who Work in CQV

Typically, people working in CQV have experience in every aspect of the entire CQV process. In Europe, companies hire purely C&Q engineers for their projects and thereafter the validation process is handled by an in-house team. Nevertheless, even C&Q engineers have expertise in Validation since they typically acquire these skills early in their career. The professionals, working in CQV, usually have a background of chemical engineering or experience working in production as well as on equipment and process engineering, prior to shifting to CQV.

 

Jobs in CQV

Given the kind of work CQV engineers do, they are usually in demand where there are projects and where major investments are taking place. These are generally the companies that invest in new projects.

In the last few years, there has been a high demand for CQV professionals in major parts of Europe, including the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland with the contract duration of roughly a year. Particularly, biopharmaceutical organisations are now looking for CQV professional, and the majority of investment are happening in this field.

Presently, the demand for biopharmaceutical industry-specific professionals is on the rise, so any CQA experience within this sector may prove lucrative. To excel in this area, you may require experience working on a project, encompassing the complete life cycle of the CQV processes.

 

The CQV Market

Currently, it is a market, driven by candidates, where there are a lot of projects, but not ample number of qualified engineers to fulfil burgeoning clients’ requirements. Due to this reason, the focus is on investing in professionals to excel through the disciplines and shift to CQV. At present, not many professionals are coming through and it’s in the best interest of the sector to upskill less experienced professionals to fill any skills gaps in future.

 

Reasons to Work in CQV

Engineers who want to upskill themselves, and enhance their potential to earn and work with a greater variation in systems and projects can get immense opportunities in CQV. Contractors in CQV may experience more number of programs and can get the chance to work with different products and technologies while enjoying genuinely compelling work. In essence, it is a specialised industry in which engineers can become subject matter experts immediately.  

 

Contractors’ Expectations from Employers

Contractors, in general, want to work on a wide range of projects, and what excites them is the possibility to work in new facilities, particularly on start-up projects. They want to be engaged in the process, right from the commencement while taking ownership. Everyone loves watching things that they have developed from scratch and are working well and these contractors are no exception. Contractors may also be interested in the location of contracts and with organisations that support amazing work culture.