Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an external audit senior and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An External Audit Senior is responsible for ensuring successful completion of assigned audit engagements. This includes preplanning, administration, and management of the entire process. This position reports to the Internal Audit Senior Management team.
General duties include, conducting assigned audit engagements successfully from beginning to end, identifying and communicating issues that have come up while offering solutions that are relevant to business and risk, developing an audit program and testing procedures that are related to risk and test objectives, ensuring adherence at all times to all the applicable departments and professional standards, supervising and offering guidance to junior auditors assigned to engagements
Core Skills Required to be an External Audit Senior
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
An external audit senior should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Accuracy:
Accuracy refers to the closeness of a measured value to a known value or standard that is passed by the governing laws.
An External Audit Senior has to always be accurate with figures and data used and required in the office without any guesswork or estimations to facilitate precise and correct information in every department creating an authentic environment that will be respected by the workers.
Interpersonal Skills:
Interpersonal Skills are a set of abilities that enable a person to positively interact and work with others effectively while avoiding office disputes and personal issues with each other.
An External Audit Senior must learn the importance of these skills in the workplace and emphasis on every employee possessing them to build a more cohabit able and productive workplace with the help of each.
Supervisory Skills:
Supervisory Skills is the ability to lead and manage people effectively in a difficult and challenging atmosphere in the day to day life.
An External Audit Senior must cultivate, develop and refine management and supervisory skills to strengthen the present as well as build the future of the business by becoming competent in such roles like problem-solving, communication, managing people, time management, leadership, planning, etc.
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills:
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills are services that allow employers to assess their employees? contributions to the organization for the period they have been working with them.
An External Audit Senior must creatively develop a robust evaluation process that includes the standard evaluation form, approved performance measures, guidelines for presenting feedback and disciplinary procedures to promote staff recognition and rewarding following a fair assessment and appraisal process.
Work Attitude:
Work Attitude is one's feelings towards and beliefs about one's job and their behavior that can tell how it feels to be there.
An External Audit Senior ought to encourage his workers and provide all the requirements for the workplace to ensure a positive attitude is maintained by the employees that can help them get a promotion, succeed on projects, meet goals and enjoy the job more.
Personal Relationships:
Personal Relationships is the relationship between individuals who have or have had a continuing relationship of any nature either professional or informal.
An External Audit Senior reserves the right to take prompt action if an actual or potential conflict of interest arises concerning individuals who engage in a personal relationship that may affect terms and conditions of employment and he should not also date a subordinate.
Problem/Situation Analysis:
Problem/Situation Analysis is the ability to solve problems and assess situations to know what kind of solution is required to calm it down.
An External Audit Senior should learn how to identify and analyze problems and situations as well as use available resources to resolve them constructively by reaching a consensus through looking at an issue in a professional, not personal way.
Deadlines - On time:
Deadlines - On time is the ability to prioritize the important tasks and setting up a plan on how to work on them first to deliver within the set period.
An External Audit Senior must have the art of managing deadlines by being able to prioritize the work that is set for scheduling to the workers according to how vital the projects are and how soon they need to be executed and submitted.
Knowledge Management:
Knowledge Management is the ability to manage knowledge and information that is presented to the company from different sources without overlooking any of them.
An External Audit Senior ought to creatively channel all the new information, tools, input, and methodology mean by actively practicing the art of knowledge management within the business by harnessing the organization's inherent wisdom's platform in one place.
Technology Savvy:
Technology Savvy is the introduction of the digital technology in the workplace as a strategy to make tasks run swiftly against doing them manually.
An External Audit Senior must ensure that the technology he introduces to the workplace integrated seamlessly with the workflow and empowers the users rather than complicates and damages the workflow making sure the employees are well prepared and not overwhelmed with the technology.
Hard Skills Required to be an External Audit Senior
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
An external audit senior should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.