After reading a certain amount of depressing things about paucity or ineffectiveness of 'good' internal auditors, let me relate my own more fortunate experience.
I am an advisor to a company (I had been their G.M QA and MR for nearly 11 years till some years back). About 5 years back I arranged to have 9 of their staff members, from different departments, trained as Internal Auditors by DNV. I knew it was a generic training and would not be adequate to make them good auditors. As Sidney said you can't become a good driver simply through class room training. So I followed it up, showing them how the requirements that they had learnt applied to various operations and processes in their own company. I conducted a number of preparatory sessions before they could carry out their first internal audit. I helped them prepare checklists that would be applicable to their particular areas of operations. It took three successive internal audits to make them reasonably good internal auditors.
Here i must add that I had complete support of the management. Each of the Audit reports was discussed by the management in a meeting with all departments. Wherever the discussions and feedback indicated a need for changes in procedures or for some specific training, the same was carried out.
Of course, if there had been no management support this story would also have been one of the typical ones.
I am an advisor to a company (I had been their G.M QA and MR for nearly 11 years till some years back). About 5 years back I arranged to have 9 of their staff members, from different departments, trained as Internal Auditors by DNV. I knew it was a generic training and would not be adequate to make them good auditors. As Sidney said you can't become a good driver simply through class room training. So I followed it up, showing them how the requirements that they had learnt applied to various operations and processes in their own company. I conducted a number of preparatory sessions before they could carry out their first internal audit. I helped them prepare checklists that would be applicable to their particular areas of operations. It took three successive internal audits to make them reasonably good internal auditors.
Here i must add that I had complete support of the management. Each of the Audit reports was discussed by the management in a meeting with all departments. Wherever the discussions and feedback indicated a need for changes in procedures or for some specific training, the same was carried out.
Of course, if there had been no management support this story would also have been one of the typical ones.

