Michelle: So we'd love to hear more about your thoughts on auditing and kind of the secrets to it. So could you give us a little overview of what your article is about?

Susan: Oh, absolutely. It's come over the years of the career when I was training internal auditors that a lot of them just don't know where to start. And it can be intimidating when you're starting to learn how to do audits or learning a new skill, just like everything, it takes practice, right? As simple as that.

So I realized that maybe having some tips and tricks that might help some people along the way. So I put together this article just to say, auditing isn't scary. First of all, auditors were just regular people. You know, we are typically people. We are those that like to be out there. We like to engage, we like to help. You know, we're looking for ways to improve. That's part of our job. Effectiveness, efficiency, improvement, that's part of our job. People think we're like the police. Well, you know, okay, sure, we do have some things that we have to follow up on and check now and then, but we're there to help. And so I think, you know, making a process-based auditing, making internal auditing easier for people, better, so that they can make their skills a little bit more refined. And again, the big part of that is just practice, practice, practice. So putting together some tips and I start the article off with auditing is a journey.

And I do believe that when you're starting your career, I don't know how many auditors woke up one day and said, I'm going to grow up to be an auditor. I don't know who does that. And maybe some of us did. I didn't and we fell into quality. And sometimes that happens. We often just fall into quality and, therefore, we often stumble across auditing and, and so, it's not something that we necessarily put a plan, a life plan in place for something like that. So auditing is a journey. We never get bored and are the clients changed, the situation changes, the process changed, the department changed. The procedures changed, the manual changed, the standard changed. How can you possibly get bored with them?

So this auditing is a journey and appreciating that journey and where it's gonna take you both in your career, if you're just starting out, practice, get better at it, do it, do it more, do it often, get yourself on that audit list. And even if you've been a refined auditor and you've done it for years, you know what? A little bit of back to school can help too. So I put these tips and tricks together just to sort of give everyone a little bit of a heads up to say, you know, keep this in mind because this is important stuff here.