Congratulations!
You’ve just received you Six Sigma Green Belt certification. So what’s next?
You have options now. You could progress your training to eventually become a Black Belt or beyond or you could explore the new careers open to you with your Green Belt.
Or maybe you’re still deciding. You’re thinking about becoming Six Sigma certified, but you aren’t sure just what it can do for you.
What it can do is open up a wealth of opportunities.
“What opportunities,” you ask?
Here are just a handful of careers you’re eligible for with your Six Sigma Green Belt.
Six Sigma Green Belt Consultant
Your knowledge as a certified Green Belt can be all the leverage you need to start a career in consultancy.
In the mid-’90s, Ford Motor Company adopted Six Sigma to help reduce costs while improving the quality of their product and stabilizing their customer satisfaction rates.
With companies implementing Six Sigma philosophies comes the need for trainers and consultants.
Consultants will be expected to identify the root causes of declining productivity and map out clearly defined strategies for their company’s improvement.
Doing well at this job will let you branch out to other careers like quality assurance, project management, or other careers that you can find in this article.
Lead Manufacturing Engineer
The field for manufacturing engineers with Six Sigma experience that’s green belt or higher is wide open, especially for those with “lean” backgrounds.
While regular Six Sigma focuses on process improvement, lean methodology zeroes in on eliminating waste.
There are eight specific kinds of waste that lean Six Sigma seeks out: Defects, over-production, waiting, misused employees, transportation, motion, and extra-processing.
To rid the workplace of waste, a manufacturing engineer would perform a series of assessments.
Companies will look for someone who can seek out defects in the manufacturing process and implement the solutions.
The ideal manufacturing engineer will be able to perform technical studies and report the findings by creating new work instructions that solve issues. They should also plan for new problems that will come about with the change in processes.
A lead manufacturing engineer will be able to do all that without supervision and while managing their own team.
Business Process Manager
Six Sigma and the business process management (BPM) share a common goal: improving the quality of business by improving project performance.
While Six Sigma has DMAIC, BPM has its own model: design, model, execute, monitor, and optimize. The tactics are different, but these ideas can be combined.
Six Sigma and BPM together can speed up production time and increase the agility of a company’s processes. They also form a broader approach to problem-solving.
Six Sigma fixes small, isolated problems. BPM prioritizes the bigger picture. Together, they can give a business process manager the ability to view the macro and micro versions of their current projects.
A business process manager will act as a partner to the company they’re a part of.
Instead of looking for flaws in the machine, a process manager knows that just because something works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
They’ll be looking for opportunities to develop efficiency without interrupting business processes.
Quality Assurance Manager
One of the pillars of Six Sigma is quality management.
As structured, the Six Sigma process will run smoothly more than 99% of the time. This makes people with Six Sigma Green Belt certifications the ideal candidates for careers in quality assurance.
A quality assurance manager will be responsible for auditing manufacturing processes. From there, they will recommend new processes, train employees who need training, and solve problems that decrease productivity.
Maintaining a consistent product while keeping costs in check is a key part of the job.
Project Manager
Think about the constraints of any project: scope, time, cost, and quality.
Six Sigma training has the potential to create a hyper-competent project manager.
Applying Six Sigma methods to these constraints makes the “how” of managing a project into an answerable question.
Looking at scope through the lens of Six Sigma means coming up with clear expectations for the project. It takes the constraint of time and sets schedules, a firm deadline, and project milestones.
Risk Manager
A risk manager will use Six Sigma to do analyses of business practices to find out the current risks of the operation.
A popular field for a risk manager is healthcare. They focus on safety practices, like how a hospital is attending to its patients.
They will also have an interest in protecting the assets of the hospital or company they work for. This could mean handling false allegations or weeding out fraud.
On the job, a healthcare risk manager would investigate malpractice, consult on legal action against the hospital, and lead safety training seminars.
Reliability Engineer
Reliability engineers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of products.
Making sure products work correctly through their periods of use involves many of the same skills as other Six Sigma qualifying jobs:
Assessing process and where they are going wrong. Realizing “bad actors”, or aspects of production that cause incidents. And helping their company make a sustained effort in product reliability.
The Six Sigma philosophy is built on reliability. The process aims for 99.99966% of products to be completed without defect.
Reliability managers ensure this high success rate by making sure that assets are maintained correctly.
Get Your Career Started
These are just seven of the career opportunities now open to you with your Six Sigma Green Belt certification.
Six Sigma training is so versatile that with the knowledge you have now, you’ll make a beneficial asset to any company.
Or maybe you don’t yet have a Six Sigma Green Belt, and you’re deciding if it’s the right path for you?
You’ve heard a lot about Six Sigma and the many career opportunities it can open for you. Take your career into your own hands.
Seek out a career that needs your depth of experience or get on your way to becoming a Six Sigma Green Belt now. Six Sigma is not just a corporate philosophy, but an investment in your future.
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