Professional Career:

After graduating in 1977, Nigel’s career has taken him from the British Steel Corporation’s graduate training programme in the UK; to the University of California at Berkeley (USA) where, as a  prestigious Harkness Fellow, he conducted post-doctoral research; to JP Kenny (subsea engineering consultants) where he conducted supplier evaluations in the Norwegian Oil & Gas Industry; Director of Quality at a Brazilian specialty steel and superalloy producer, and, more recently, as a world-renowned independent specialist in quality management, quality infrastructure, management systems and conformity assessment. He currently Chairs or sits on the Board of a number of organizations around the world, and is a Senior Consultant for UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Devleopment Organization)

Professional Ativities:

Dr. Nigel Croft has represented Brazil (ABNT) as an expert to ISO/TC176 (Quality Assurance and Quality Management) since 1995. From 2010 to 2018 he was Chair of the Subcommittee TC176/SC2 for Quality Systems, with overall responsibility for the ISO 9001 and ISO 9004 standards, among others, and from 2019 – 2021 he was convener of the global ISO Task Force that revised the core structure and content for all ISO’s Management System Standards (“Annex SL”). In 2021 Dr Croft was appointed by ISO’s Technical Management Board (“TMB”) to chair its Joint Technical Coordination Group for Management System Standards (the “JTCG”). He has been active in the IAF for over 20 years, as the ISO/TC176 Liaison representative – a position he has held intermittently since 1998 – and has in the past been an active member of the ISO/CASCO CPC as well as WG21 for the development of ISO/IEC 17021-1 (2006 and 2011 versions).

Nigel is a Fellow of the UK’s Chartered Quality Institute, an IRCA-registered Principal Auditor of Quality Management Systems (until 2022), a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality and a Member of the Brazilian Academy for Quality.

In 2017 Dr Croft was awarded the American Society for Quality’s Freund-Marquardt medal, “For his passion, dedication and leadership in the application of quality management principles to the development, promotion and implementation of quality management system standards on a global scale, for over twenty years”, and in 2018 he was the recipient of an Honorary Award from the UK’s Chartered Quality Institute “for his substantial contribution to the evolution of the ISO 9000 family – the world’s most popular set of quality management standards and for his leadership on the development of ISO 9001, among other major standards, which has given companies worldwide the tools to drive improvement and embed quality across all aspects of the business».

Dr. Nigel H. Croft  is founder and honorary board member of the World Council for Quality