Paul Thijssen studied Business Administration at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and has a background in accountancy. After completing his study, he started out working for the marketing and sales department of a pharmaceutical company and for a specialized commercial bank. In 1993 he founded Thijssen Consultancy which advised clients on issues in the field of strategy, organization structure and culture. He devoted particular attention to creating a shared context for the three above mentioned topics and making it easier to implement policy choices.

In 2002 he became deputy director of the IOWO, a commercial consultancy bureau for education, policy and organization affiliated with the Radboud University Nijmegen. Here he was mainly responsible for commercial strategy, organization structure design, work processes and quality assurance. In addition, he carried out numerous consultancies for education institutes, including the implementation of the BalancedScoreCard, a new strategy spanning the full width of higher education. He helped to reorganize a large cluster of auxiliary services and supervised the takeover of a certain education institute. Paul Thijssen has also fulfilled various interim management functions in secondary education and with a very large commercial distance learning organisation.

Paul Thijssen has been director of NQA since September 2009 and focuses primarily on optimizing services for clients and target groups and expanding services in the field of internal quality assurance and organization. He undertakes consultancy work for education institutes in the afore-mentioned focus areas.