Happy birthday plastic quality tester
For 40 years now, specialist personnel for the plastics industry have been trained in plastics knowledge, testing methods and quality management. The content is constantly revised and adapted to the requirements of standardization, technology, business and legislation.
40 years of plastics quality testers at SKZ (Photo: Luca Hoffmannbeck, SKZ)
At the beginning, the content was still very broad and sometimes went very deep into the subject matter. The statistics section in particular was pure stress for many course participants. However, the scope has changed considerably over the years. In 1985, for example, the course lasted four weeks, with one week alone being devoted to the functions of the calculator in detail. From today's perspective, this was far too long and, especially as far as the statistics part was concerned, far too detailed. The course is now divided into two parts, each lasting five days.
However, the basic idea for the quality inspector has not changed over the years. The aim remains to provide both quality assurance specialists in the field of plastics and career changers from other areas with the necessary skills to understand the special features of working with this material.
Understanding of quality
However, the best testing methods are useless if the understanding and attitude towards quality are not right. Quality awareness is therefore just as important a part of the course as materials science and statistics. For all those who are currently at war with statistics, here is the good news: the content has been greatly simplified and adapted to the essential tasks in quality inspection, especially with regard to the target group, which often comes from other industries with little previous knowledge. What counts here is an understanding of the basics and the usefulness of statistical process control and measurement system analyses. Anyone who requires in-depth knowledge of statistics can build on the basic knowledge and learn more advanced knowledge in a separate course with a very practical focus.
2025 will bring a few more innovations. For course participants who attended the quality inspector course many years ago, there will now be a course in which participants can refresh their knowledge and bring it up to date. Those who have only completed the first part will soon have the opportunity to book a repetition of this course in order to better prepare for the second part. This is particularly useful if there is a longer period of time between part 1 and part 2.
“With the consistent further development of our Plastics Quality Inspector course, we have been ensuring the further training of specialists for the plastics industry for decades,” says Christoph Kreutz, Head of the Quality Management Training Center at SKZ in Würzburg. “For this year's courses, we will be adding more practical exercises with testing methods from the plastics industry and content such as visual inspections. We are therefore constantly adapting the content to current topics from the market and are therefore fit for the next 40 years.”
You can find the two-part course and the in-depth statistics section here:
Plastics quality tester part 1
Plastics quality inspector part 2
Statistics for quality assurance
All information on the SKZ learning formats can be found at
https://www.skz.de/en/training/courses
