I'm still in the Navy, but I've been casually job hunting for about a year now. I'd say that 80% of the QA jobs I've found online have been in either a medical, or a software field. As a submarine QAI/Planner/QAS I have not felt like my experience would translate well into these fields. At TAP they told us that only about 20% of jobs are found on the internet, and most of those are found on company websites. To specifically use just the QAS qual in the civilian sector, I would think you would have to work for a defense contractor. I'm sure you could make 60-80K to start.
Things are all about how you write your resume though. You're not going to write "served QAS" on your resume, because no one is going to know what that means. You have to look at the job attributes that the company is looking for, and figure out if there is a way that your work experience fits. For example, using my experience as CMPO/RPPO/MLPO, I can write a resume that will compete for a job managing receiving. Be creative, just don't lie. If you can't talk about the experiences you've written about, it's going to be obvious you lied, and you never know who knows who.
If you want to learn more about civilian QA, I would look at the American Society for Quality's website
www.asq.org Once you get past the technician level quality is a completely different world for them. It's all about process improvement, and you need lean and six sigma experience/certs for those jobs. Even being a technician is different. I printed off the exam for their quality inspector cert, and maybe a quarter of the questions were similar to QAI questions.
