Valued worldwide – what can you do with a Chartered IIA designation?

An internal audit certification, membership of the Chartered IIA and relevant experience may lead to promotion within an organisation, which is great. However, for those who want a different kind of career, it also provides a valuable toolkit of skills that are desirable (and much-needed) worldwide – and which can help to improve governance and, therefore, real lives in diverse environments and countries.

In my career as an internal auditor, I am fortunate to have worked with many different national Institutes of Internal Auditors, spoken at international conferences and delivered internal audit training in Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia, the UAE, Ukraine and elsewhere. I got a taste for travel early on in my internal audit career, with work trips to the United States, and it’s been hugely interesting ever since. I’ve been to so many new places, made lots of wonderful contacts and have helped governments and other organisations to improve the way they do things through training delivery, advisory work and capacity building.

Most of my engagements come from word-of-mouth recommendations, but I originally got into doing this after training as an internal auditor with the then UK government Civil Service College. I did well in my exams, so they invited me to deliver training while my day job was also taking off. Around the same time, the Chief Examiner of the Institute of Internal Auditors, UK and Ireland invited me to join the examinations team.

My work at the Civil Service College (later the National School of Government), led to an interesting request to go to Northern Iraq in the mid-2000s to train government
officials and civil servants in the Kurdish Regional Government.

It was a culture shock – think Black Hawk Down. The week after my first visit, a suicide bomber detonated a device killing himself and many  Kurdish officials. It wasn’t the safest time to be there. I went out with a fantastic colleague every couple of months to deliver one-week courses and on one occasion my driver took a wrong turn and we nearly ended up in the middle of the three-way conflict taking place in downtown Mosul. Meanwhile, I also began to deliver training and examination revision courses for the then Institute of Internal Auditors, UK and Ireland. Happy days. Making connections

After a few years delivering training assignments in addition to my normal job, contacts and clients began to approach me directly. The Ministry of Defence invited me to deliver a programme of training after being approached by contacts in the Georgian Ministry of Defence who wanted to upskill their internal audit team. The Georgian internal auditors were keen to operate in line with international good practice and I’ve been working with them ever since, sometimes in conjunction with the MOD, sometimes with NATO, and sometimes with the OECD and the wider Georgian public sector.

The work with the  OECD has been particularly interesting. I’ve led on designing, developing and implementing (with local experts) a National Internal Audit Certification Programme for central and local government internal auditors in Georgia, based on the global IIA Competency Framework. Many people there would struggle to study for the CIA qualification in English, so we have designed and implemented something that works locally. The first students sat the exams for the first and second modules in November 2023. Results so far have been positive.

The UK government often contributes support globally in niche areas where we have valued expertise – for example, in anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures, internal audit and assurance – so internal audit skills are particularly relevant.

One thing often leads to another. After my first trip to Georgia, colleagues in Ukraine asked me to deliver a similar programme for the Ministry of Defence internal audit service there. This was a much larger commitment and also achieved real progress and momentum over several years, with some big successes. I was last there in-person three weeks before Putin’s invasion. I keep in regular contact with my colleagues and friends there and I’ve now embarked on a similar programme in Armenia, which I hope to roll out further this year.

Other jobs have arisen from my work leading courses for the Chartered IIA. Several Institutes of Internal Auditors across Europe and elsewhere have invited me to run training sessions and to speak at their conferences. I’m delivering a session at the annual conference of the Swedish Institute of Internal Auditors this year, and I hope to add two or three more countries as my global work expands.

Sharing experiences

It’s incredibly rewarding to help internal audit leaders in other regions to modernise their teams in line with the IPPF (and its successor) and to move away from a historical focus on inspection towards a more risk-based approach. Elements of culture vary in different countries, but generally the problems and concerns are the same as they are here. Often, it’s about helping teams to create a more participative relationship with management in the first and second lines, and to move towards adding value and improving, rather than blame, or even punishing wrongdoers. In the UK, we’ve been doing this for longer, so we have valuable experience to pass on and this is hugely appreciated.

It’s also rewarding to help internal audit teams become more skilful at combating fraud and corruption – and I’ve seen teams enjoy real successes here. There are lots of good people doing good things, but in some places, they must deal with a long tradition of corruption.

This means that internal audit skills are not only useful, but they are also warmly received. I admire the courage of these internal auditors because tackling fraud and corruption is dangerous – internal auditors have been killed for doing their jobs in some countries. It’s a risk, but it’s also a sign that what they are doing is effective.

The new Global Internal Audit Standards include a Standard on courage and my experiences have made me realise that this means very different things in different places. It can have direct, personal consequences in many jurisdictions. People I’ve worked with have spoken up despite being threatened and even fired for doing their jobs too well.

Of course, delivering internal audit training overseas is not all glamorous travel – I sometimes deliver live online courses for the Institute of Internal Auditors in Australia, which means working from 2am-5am in UK time. It’s not much better doing the same for clients in Malaysia and Singapore. When doing in-person work, there is a lot of hanging around airports and delayed flights.

But the work is hugely varied. In addition to training, I’ve delivered many external quality assessments overseas, worked directly with overseas government ministers, met a president or two, and worked with a huge number of fantastic internal audit and risk colleagues. Helping to develop the National Certification Programme for a whole country is particularly exciting – you don’t get a chance to do something like that very often.

John Chesshire leads Chartered IIA courses including Sanctions: It’s a World of Pain Out There, People auditing: assurance over employee engagement, and Environmental, Social and Governance. He also co-leads Geopolitical Risk and the Role of the Internal Auditor. He is the owner of JC Audit Training Limited.

This article was published in January 2024.