What Is a Q Statement?
A Q statement is a sentence that expresses a numerical measurement of some action or accomplishment which you have performed. A Q statement is quantitative. Also the Q statement is not vague; it’s exact in value. For example, rather than saying you “increased productivity,” using a Q statement, you would say that you “in 2008 we increased productivity by 25 percent.”
Why we need to quantify a skill? Let’s take a look at the following statements and see which of them bears the most weight and leaves the longest-lasting impression:
STATEMENT A -:
I am a good planner.
STATEMENT B -:
I reduced overhead by 25 percent while increasing profits by 43 percent annually.
Which of these two statements seems the most evocative? From which one can you make a mental picture? Which will you remember? Statement B is more descriptive and more concrete. It does not simply make a claim or advance a personal opinion. Statement B uses actual facts and numbers to specifically demonstrate the skills. This kind of clarification gives the listener evidence of the skill and a good idea of the scope of it.
Statement B is Q statement as it uses actual facts and numbers to specifically demonstrate the skills.
Given are few ways to quantify your statements:
- By numbers of people, places, things, units, or actions, such as “handled 1500 telephone calls per day.”
- By amounts of money saved or earned, such as “Rs300,000 savings” or “Rs100,000 in profits.”
- In % (or fractions), such as “60 percent decrease in waste”, or “35 percent increase in production.”
- By mentioning time saved.This is directly proportional to money gained.
- By a subjective or objective scale or rank, such as “7.9 on a scale of 1 to 10 for increased customer satisfaction” or “moving from number 450 to number 321 on the Fortune 500 list.”
Verb + (who, what, when, where, how) + Result = Q statement
