Video transcript: What skills does a performance auditor need to have?
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Title: What skills does a performance auditor need to have?
David Moynahan, Senior Performance Auditor
First of all, you need to have the ability to think critically. You need to be able to look at a whole lot of
information and try and delve down to actually happening of the public sector.
Karen Wong, Manager, Performance Audit Practice and Methodology
Analytical skills are really important to the job. We have to take evidence which might be from documents, from talking to people, and put it all together and say, 'well, what does that all mean?' and tell a story with that to actually address the questions that we might have set out for the audit.
Leanne Arker, Senior Performance Auditor
What we do is we identify the most significant matters that need to be brought to Parliament's attention, so you need to be able to sift out the big issues from the small stuff.
Karen Wong
But with that comes, obviously, the ability to talk to people, to establish relationships quickly
because you're building relationships with a whole lot of people that you're collecting evidence from. Curiosity, flexibility, adaptability, so you know those really broad skills to be able to kind of apply to a particular analytical process.
Edward Tanoi, Performance Auditor
So being able to self review and self critique is really important. Always asking questions around why things are done and thinking about how they could be done better.
Leanne Arker
We can teach people the tools and the techniques but really people bring with them their judgement, their life experience, their work experience, and they need to bring all of that to bear on their work. I don't think you can really teach people to be curious, so we try and recruit people who have got those kind of innate abilities and then we give them the tools about how we do things in our organisation.
Evaan Aramakutu, Manager, Performance Audit
We've had people from all sorts of backgrounds that others I know have found really quite surprising.
Leanne Arker
Gosh – just anything you can think of we've had somebody probably and their background in the time I've been here, so you know it's not just a job for accountants. As long as you've got transferable knowledge and skills, a different perspective is valuable.
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