Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an internal audit senior manager and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An Internal Audit Senior Manager is responsible for managing all the auditors and auditing processes set in place. He is the overall manager of the entire verification process with both junior and senior auditors reporting to him/her. This position allows verification of any data provided by the auditing group before it is released to the president of the company or the CEO.
More responsibilities include verifying the annual internal reports, ensuring internal controls and corporate laws are both compliant, follow-up on pending audit reports, leading auditors meetings, training, and workshops, conducting the risk assessment of assigned departments, identify risk based audit programs and find solutions.
Core Skills Required to be an Internal Audit Senior Manager
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 internal audit senior manager 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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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.
Knowledge of Company Processes:
Knowledge of Company Processes is the in-depth understanding of a collection of related, structured activities that serve a particular goal for a group of customers or clients who are valuable to the enterprise.
An Internal Audit Senior Manager ought to maintain consistency across the daily processed while keeping a keen eye on the overall plan of the organization by ensuring the company processes are performed and followed.
Giving Feedback:
Giving Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop employees and improve performance through honest feedback of the work done best and areas that need improvement.
An Internal Audit Senior Manager should be skilled in giving out both praise and criticism in a wise way to occasionally show workers where they need to improve and providing them with an observer's insight into the progress of their performance.
Managing at team:
Managing is the administration of an organization which includes activities of setting the strategy of an organization and coordinating the efforts of the employees to accomplish its objectives.
An Internal Audit Senior Manager must learn the art of creating corporate policy, organizing, planning, controlling and directing organization resources to achieve the aims of the policies formed while making decisions to oversee the enterprise.
Initiative:
An initiative is the ability to assess and initiate things independently often done without any managerial influence offered.
An Internal Audit Senior Manager must train his workers to take up tasks without being asked to and work on them without being supervised to a quality that is accepted by the company, therefore nurturing a skill that grows the individual and the group as well.
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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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.
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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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 Internal Audit Senior Manager 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 Internal Audit Senior Manager
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 internal audit senior manager should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.