Course Description

Conducting efficient and effective interviews are essential to the success of an internal auditor.  This seminar will provide a framework to help develop your interview skills and/or show additional ways to strengthen current skills.  Examples of real life interview challenges and potential solutions will be shared to better prepare you for the difficult interview.  Use of the tips, techniques and tools provided will enable you to become a more effective interviewer.   The above items and many other things will be addressed in this seminar to assist in the development of your interviewing skills (e.g. listening skills, developing business acumen, working with difficult people, relationships and their impact on interviews, etc.).  Having strong interviewing skills are an essential element for gathering audit evidence to support audit conclusions.

In this training, we will discuss the following important issues:

• Tips, tools & techniques to conduct more valuable interviews
• Skills needed to become a successful interviewer
• Communication skills and building client/customer relationships
• Setting the environment and tone to improve how the interviewee perceives the process
• Planning to promote an efficient/effective interview
• Working with difficult people for successful interview results
• Using business acumen to develop better interview questions
• Focusing on the audit objective to make the interview more efficient/effective for the participants (e.g. staying on track, summarizing the appropriate information, follow-up questions, etc.)

Learning Objectives

• Understand why interviews are important to the audit process
• Learn the barriers to a successful interview and techniques to overcome barriers
• Realize the different interview types and how to approach them to increase the opportunity for success
• Learn how to improve communication and relationship building skills to better gather evidence
• Understand and review sample questions for different interview types
• Learn how to plan for an interview
• Identify the steps of an interview and learn how to appropriately execute each step
• Recognize and learn about real life interview examples that didn’t go as planned and potential solutions
• Strengthen your follow-up interviews
• Gain knowledge about lessons learned and leading practices
• Review how to use the tip lists and other reference materials for future development

You will leave the session able to:

• Conduct interviews to better gather pertinent information
• Use communication methods/tips to facilitate successful interviews
• Understand the key steps and how to conduct a successful audit interview
• Develop your communication skills to enable completion of better interviews resulting in evidence gathering to support audit conclusions
• Conduct different types of interviews efficiently/effectively
• Use the tips, techniques and tools provided to conduct better interviews

Who Should Attend

• Auditors with five year or less experience (IT, Operational, Performance, Financial) that want to learn new tips, techniques & tools to develop their interview skills
• More experienced auditors (greater than five years’ experience) that want a refresher or to identify new ideas/approaches on conducting interviews to gather better evidence that support audit conclusions

Prerequisites

None - all auditors benefit from this seminar.

View/Download PDF Version of the Couse Descripton