How does training impact the work of new auditors?
We provide training to our newly hired auditors because government auditing is very different than business auditing. Unfortunately, no universities specialize in this field, and even a single class is rare. We try to update and improve our training each time, but what we’ve learned in the last year about our instructional design approach has given us new insights.
First, what we taught was not specifically designed to help new performance auditors conduct their day-to-day work. We explained about preparing a good workpaper, or using our software, Teammate. But there were gaps in the framework and perspective of auditing. To address those gaps, we began to develop trainings that complemented our practical nuts and bolts offerings with courses focusing on soft skills development and leadership.
Auditing has a maze-like feeling for the new hire but we sometimes forget that there are two perspectives of a maze – the bird’s eye view, and the view from inside. From above, our eye can trace the shortest route. But inside, there are no direction markers. Success must come by assembling a clear memory of the layout of the maze through arduous trial and error.
Inside Hampton Court Maze
Some people enjoy the puzzle of a maze and pay to wander through corn mazes. Some have no patience for mazes. The image to the right makes some folks feel like a lab rat. And not a very smart one, since I hear that lab rats are quite capable of negotiating mazes.
But even as we think about this frustration, we also need to ’embrace the maze’. Every new audit is an agency maze. We try to understand how all the program and financial pieces fit together, and build up the picture through interviews, data analysis, and observation.
On the financial side we have workpapers and team member continuity to guide us through the maze of risks each year. On the performance side, we are often entering new agency mazes and our initial, scoping phase produces a rough drawing of the maze to help us narrow down to an issue that we should audit.
Above Hampton Court
The other maze is our audit process. We want newly hired auditors to be able to negotiate their way through the agency maze without also getting lost in the auditing maze. The better we can prepare new auditors in our methods and procedures, how to audit, the more they can focus on what they are auditing.
Our instructional design efforts are laying out the tasks more clearly for new hires with 11 classes so far. For example, we have training on audit documentation, interviewing, elements of a finding, sufficiency of evidence, and report writing. This knowledge and skill set are spread out, presented when a new hire will encounter them, then reinforced as they do their work.
Nonetheless, we recognize that many aspects of auditing are affected by circumstances and context that can’t be set in procedure. Strategies, priorities, principles, and standards provide general guidance in these situations. Leadership is also important and we want to help our newly promoted team leads understand the new responsibilities and situations they must take on, and perform them with competence and confidence.
We are developing that team leader training in our next phase, and some intermediate auditor training, and some technical training on specific software or analytical tools.
This seems like a lot of work but we are asking our auditors to develop and offer the classes, which involves us all in the responsibility of defining expectations, developing the content, and presenting the instruction.
We want to shorten the learning curves of our auditors because that translates into highly professional work from everybody. Staff members that have had the opportunity to take part in thorough and holistic training are a key element of a learning organization.
