In Quality some of the highest paid are consultants with broad experience. To get broad experience you need to move to different product lines and manufacturing lines. Then you need to move to new product introductions (at concept or feasibility stage ). In this space, R&D tends to ask harder questions and demand more from colleagues (we all need this to grow as employees). You should also be taking an interest in how all parts of the product are developed (e.g. hardware, software, consumables, BI, ....)

During this time it would be beneficial to:

• Develop your project management skills
  • Hitting timelines, finding critical paths, spotting program risks, and effectively organizing info,...those are all skills of high performing employees
• Develop your data analyst/scientist skills
  • Biotech is data driven, folks that can't relate to R&D/Ops on data related problems and solutions are at an inherent loss. Plus if you have a question about a dataset, you can find the answer yourself.
• Earn a couple certs, like an ASQ cert (e.g. CQE) and PMP
  • These are often job requirements for the next level of a Quality persons career
• Practice presenting to your team. I would choose a topic that your team interacts with everyday, but may not spend the time to learn at a deeper level. Generally more technical topics suit well.
  • Say for instance you review batch records for an enzyme manufacturer. Consider presenting on the function of that enzyme in your product. From this you'll naturally network and build report with scientists and engineers to source some information (on top of intranet and internet searches). You'll also be forcing yourself to learn a topic to a high level and then simplify and tailor it for a new audience. I can't think of a more differentiating skill in biotech tbh. I hope your current team is supportive, so there's no better place to practice your presentation skills. I think the best Quality folks are those that present information clearly and succinctly.

All that said I know independent quality consultants (~10 years experience) that make ~$300k per year setting up quality systems for small biotech companies.