What’s in it for me?
This may have been the first question you began thinking about a Six Sigma certification. Whether expressed or unexpressed, it is an important question. After all, you should expect to be rewarded for the time and effort you spend earning a certification.
To better understand how a Six Sigma certification can benefit you, first think about how it will benefit your employer. If your Six Sigma knowledge, gained through certification, helps you add more value to the company and become better at solving its problems, you can claim more of the rewards your company has to offer – a recognition, promotion and salary increases, for instance.
How Your Six Sigma Knowledge Benefits Your Company
Very simply stated, Six Sigma corrects the problems that create errors. As a certified member of a Six Sigma project team, you will pursue Six Sigma’s primary objective of reducing a process’s defects to 3.4 for every one million opportunities. Earning a Six Sigma certification gives you a chance to improve your company’s performance in the following areas:
- Empowering Employees – Six Sigma strives to maximize the potential of people just as much as the potential of processes. You will learn that those who typically understand the process best are the middle managers and front-line workers who use it every day. As a certified Six Sigma team member you will frequently teach and be taught by these employees.It is critical to include employees who participate in the process every day when gathering data for your project. Working closely with these employees gives you insights into how the process really works and helps you teach them Six Sigma principles.
- Retaining Customers – Companies such as Citibank have used Six Sigma to increase customer loyalty and market share. But your company doesn’t have to be a global financial giant to use Six Sigma to improve customer experience. The first step in nurturing long-term customers is seeing your process from the customer’s point of view. Following the example of Citibank, you can use Six Sigma to modify processes to better serve your customers.
- Reducing Errors – Your objective as a certified Six Sigma project team member is not to correct errors, but to improve the process so that it doesn’t produce them. Your team will focus on three areas to reduce errors.
- Metrics – Measure the performance of the process by measuring output and production. This helps identify steps in the process that cause errors.
- Methodology – Understanding how the process creates goods and services.
- Philosophy – The Six Sigma approach looks at problems objectively to understand what the team needs to do to improve them.
- Cutting Costs – Improving quality reduces costs. It costs just as much to produce a defective product or a disappointing service as it does to produce a great one. After your Six Sigma efforts have improved the process, the same amount of time and material now produces more products and services that customers are willing to pay for. This is known as increased productivity.
So how does a Six Sigma certification benefit you? Certification gives you the skills and training to take your place among those who do what your company values most: cut costs, increase productivity and create long-term clients.
What your company values, it rewards.
