Internal Auditing – What Shall I Tell My Daughter?

This week witnessed my daughter’s 24th birthday. As is tradition I normally take her out for a meal and enquire about her life and career. What became clear over the last few years is that she has no aspiration to follow down her father’s path and become an internal auditor. Whilst a tragedy from my perspective, I do wonder what I could have done differently in selling her the notion that a career in internal auditing is truly a wonderful thing to pursue. If you were in my shoes, what would you say to your child? I posed this question to our auditors at DB and was really struck by the following response from one of my esteemed colleagues:-

“It appears that she was born in 1999 so she is part of the Generation Z. I think that it is all about how you sell it to her. Here are some ideas.

Internal Audit is probably the only function where you have a full visibility over everything going on across a company. You look at all the activities (the word process triggers negative feelings), trying to understand how things work and how you can improve them. This gives you a wide window of opportunity to make a real difference, to put an organization on the right path, and it also puts a significant amount of power in your hands. People working in Internal Audit are very highly regarded across every organization due to a large number of transferable skills. Some professions pigeonhole you, once you get into certain industry, you may struggle to change but Audit is seen as something you can easily build on, wherever you go. For some it may be a permanent profession but for others it can be just the beginning of a very successful career in another part of an organization.

It encompasses skills and traits common across a number of professions and here are just few examples:

Detective

Sometimes with very little or no clue at all, you start with a potential crime scene (and everything can become a crime scene), looking for fingerprints. Sometimes the work is just like a big puzzle and just when you thought that you were about to finish, you realize that a piece is missing so you continue with your investigation.

Data Scientist (based on Glassdoor, this profession is in top 10 most satisfying jobs for Generation Z)

Since almost everything that we do is done electronically, we often have to review a large quantify of data but before we do that, we want to make sure that that data comes from the right sources and is in an acceptable format. We have dedicated teams focusing just on data.

Psychologist (Generation Z likes that word)

Since you deal with a very diverse (a very important word for anyone born in late 90s) group of people (stakeholder makes it too corporate and not very appealing to that generation) working at different levels in an organization, in different departments. You have to try to understand their behaviors because when things go wrong, when things go really wrong, it is normally caused by conduct, by unacceptable behaviors. When we speak to people, we want to be able to listen but also read between the lines, in case there was anything they were not telling us.

Lawyer

If we find anything wrong, we have to think about the way in which we present the information. It is not just about saying this is wrong and go and fix it. This is about making a case for a change, why things have to be altered, while trying to maintain good relationships. Negotiating and presenting skills can become useful.

Doctor

Once you find where it hurts, you want to press just a little bit harder to see what the real problem is and once you do, you are then in a better position to find the right solution.”

Food for thought!