Teaching your new and transferred staff to be rockstar IT auditors
Training new people is huge in accounting firms. As you gain experience, you typically end up doing more teaching than raw accounting.
With that in mind, consider this questions, one of several I've received from my readers who have been sending me a series of interesting questions that are giving me a delightful backlog of topics to discuss..
In this case, we're asked about the difficulties you may encounter switching from one group, say the regular financial audit team, to the IT audit group in a given firm:
If, let's say, a first year financial audit staff is starting their second year in a firm and transfers into a second year IT audit staff position, wouldn't there be an almost insurmountable learning curve? The first year financial staff spent the entire first year in learning about financial auditing techniques, and now has to deal with tests on data conversions instead of auditing operating expenses!"
The good news is that no, this isn't an "almost insurmountable" learning curve. The bad news is that, yes, there will be a learning curve but how bad it is depends on a few things including:
- How closely the staff paid attention to those computer auditing lectures back in fourth year university.
- Whether they got to document some IT controls themselves while working in financial audit. Oddly enough, this too can happen.
- Their comfort level with IT - computers, software and the like.
- How smart they are in general - this is obvious, but bears stating: if you're generally clever you'll pick up IT audit quickly,
- The quality of the seniors, managers and partners who will be teaching them how to do their job.
I no doubt left out a few other relevant factors, but it doesn't matter - the fifth point is key: how you're taught affects how well you'll do your job when you're new to it.
After all, you're learning things that few people in the world even know exist as work.
Some people specialize in providing assistance to others.
Do you get more guidance as a first year rather than second year staff? Not necessarily.
Smart supervisors will tailor the amount of guidance and teaching they are going to provide to the capabilities of their staff.
The staff can help by volunteering information about their own skills early on, speaking up if it's the first time they've ever done a job or interrupting if the acronyms and jargon being tossed around are unfamiliar.
The advantage first year staff have is that they have learned one of the key tricks - looking at last year's file - but as good as that sounds, a strong teacher should not assume the staff already did the same kind of work before, and they should definitely not just say "look at last year's file and figure out." The reasons for this are well known: last year's file might not that be that good to begin with possibly because you inherited from another office or preparer, and mindlessly parroting someone else's work does not lead to the same learning experience as actually understanding what you're doing, including gaining knowledge of the deeper purpose of the work.
Last year's file is a good study aid - if you're looking at a complicated process, it helps to see if the evidence you received this year is similar in general format to what was obtained previously, but you want to understand how your work fits in the "big picture" - this control governs payments to those people, to allow that operation to get processed to completion, for example.
The moment the instructor realizes that the new staff has never done a given type of project before, teaching details about a small task should go on hold while the pair back up and take a look at what the purpose of the project is.
If you're testing the tiny details of a spreadsheet to confirm that a multi-million dollar project that affects billion dollar financial statements was performed successfully, it's good to point out exactly what those tiny details are in support of. Staff will generally be more interested in the work they're doing and knowing the overall context of where the work is coming from makes it easier to develop professional judgement when it comes to interpreting the significance of what's uncovered in the course of the audit.
If you think you could've been a good teacher but realized you'd rather do some accounting courses and maybe get paid more, then consider becoming a CA (that's #3 in the series).
Let me know how you teach your staff to be rockstars by clicking here to leave a comment.