With ISO 9001:2026 just around the corner, the topic of internal auditing is likely on the minds of many quality professionals.

This is the perfect time to reexamine your resources and strategies for internal auditing. The single biggest success factor of your audit program is who you select to audit and how you train them. After all, these people are the living face of your program. Sure, you have someone fulfilling the role of audit manager. But the real magic happens with the team of internal auditors you recruit and train.

Don’t make the mistake of just selecting people who have some extra time on their hands. Choose the right people who will help develop the audit program and make it a true engine for improvement.

So, what criteria should you use when selecting internal auditors? Here are some attributes to look for.

Curiosity: Good auditors are naturally curious. They want to know how things work. Everything about a process is fascinating to them: the materials, tasks, equipment, measurements, and products. Good auditors aren’t curious about these details because they want to write nonconformities; it’s because they want to learn. Intellectual curiosity is at the heart of auditing. When someone is naturally curious, they automatically ask probing, insightful questions, and will learn very quickly how effective the process is.

Persistence: This is what I would refer to as “stick-to-it-ness.” Auditing can be a very challenging activity, but a good auditor thrives on these challenges and keeps on going. They have the strength and determination to get the job done. People who are satisfied with giving a minimal effort don’t make good auditors. They’re simply not persistent enough. It’s important to note that auditing can be a physically challenging activity, as well as a mental challenge.

Focus: Focus is the ability to keep your thought patterns aligned with the task at hand. When you’re an internal auditor, distractions abound. Phones ring, emails ding, people come to you with problems and questions. In spite of all this, a good auditor politely shoos away distractions and stays focused on the audit. This requires equal parts of diplomacy and resolve. An auditor has to remain focused focused as well as help the auditee stay focused. The same distractions that can sidetrack an auditor will also sidetrack an auditee.

Detail orientation: Auditing is all about details. Yes, truly great auditing involves recognizing trends, but all trends begin as individual details that somebody has to discover. Good auditors pick up on details that other people miss. They use all their senses simultaneously: sight, sound, smell, touch. Through these diverse interfaces, they receive and process a wide range of information. Of course, there’s always the temptation for a detail-oriented person to nitpick. This temptation is countered by reminding oneself that ultimately the internal auditor is seeking conformance, not nonconformance.

Strategic thinking: This is what top managers are supposed to do. It involves looking beyond the day-to-day tasks and contemplating the actions that will make or break the organization over the long term. Strategic thinking is difficult because the vast majority of employees are task-oriented. They’re paid to carry out specific activities, not think about what could happen five years from now. A good auditor incorporates strategic thinking into the audit by delving deep into the processes that really affect future success. These include:
• Top management and management review
• Customer feedback
• Risk management
• Corrective action
• Internal auditing
• Product realization

Not all processes are created equal. It’s the job of the strategic-minded auditor to recognize which ones are more important. Strategic auditors are also able to recognize which opportunities and nonconformities pose the biggest risk to the organization, and they highlight these in their reporting so the issues get the correct amount of attention.

Enthusiasm: Good auditors are enthusiastic about their missions. Auditors understand the benefits of auditing and believe in the process. They want to be auditing because it feeds their intellectual curiosity. Auditors’ enthusiasm rubs off on everybody else they speak to. Little by little, this enthusiasm helps build a culture of continual improvement within the organization.

The characteristics I’ve listed above rarely correlate to formal college degrees, years of experience, tenure at the company, technical background, or anything else. They’re innate to the person. You don’t select internal auditors by examining their resumes. You select them by observing the way they do things—a simple method, but honestly the best method. It quickly will become clear who has genuine curiosity, persistence, and attention to detail. Trust your judgment, and don’t make the selection of auditors more complicated than it needs to be.

How to sell the auditing role

Based on the personal attributes listed in the previous section, it’s obvious that we’re seeking some impressive people to serve as internal auditors. The obstacle with impressive people is that they’re already busy. As you propose the idea of serving as internal auditors, one of the first responses you’ll hear from these folks is, “Hey, I already have too much to do.” Your job is to sell the benefits of serving in this role. Thankfully, the benefits are many:
• You’ll see parts of the organization nobody else gets to see. Internal auditing is the best on-the-job training exercise imaginable. As an internal auditor, you will have a deeper and broader understanding of our organization than anybody else.
• Auditing is endlessly fascinating. This statement comes from someone who has performed auditing for 30 years: me. You’ll never get bored auditing. It’s an activity that will keep you engaged and challenged no matter how long you do it. 
• You’ll learn something new every time you audit. Best practices pop up all the time during audits. You’ll discover innovative practices and cutting-edge methods, some of them completely informal and preserved only through verbal communication. As an auditor, you’ll be able to expose these methods to the rest of the organization.
• You’ll have the ability to initiate significant improvements. Do you like to make a positive impact? If your answer is yes, then internal auditing is for you. You’ll have unparalleled ability to influence the direction of change in the organization.
• You’ll catch the eye of top management. Few employees have that visibility with top management, but as an auditor you’ll have their undivided attention. The opportunities and nonconformities that you uncover will be presented directly to top management for their review.
• Auditing will make you more effective and successful in your regular job. Your experience as an internal auditor will have an immediate and positive effect on what you do now for the company. How? You’ll be able to apply the things that constitute best practices and avoid the things that constitute nonconformities.
• You won’t be asked to audit all the time. Internal auditing is a periodic activity. The actual time commitment will be a few hours a month. Top management supports your involvement and will make sure that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Ultimately, you might have the ability to “volun-tell” someone that they’re going to be an internal auditor. If that’s the case, good for you. But it’s still important to make the benefits clear to the new auditor. He or she will operate much more effectively if they understand what they’re getting out of the arrangement.

Try to recruit a wide range of personnel

The ideal audit team is made up of diverse personnel from different backgrounds and different areas of the organization. This makes for a team that’s going to challenge itself and examine audit evidence from vastly different perspectives. This is highly desirable. When you have auditors with a wide range of experiences, your team is better able to understand and audit all processes within the organization. You won’t fall into the trap of people trying to audit departments with which they have no familiarity, and you won’t fall victim to everybody on the audit team thinking the exact same way. Try to get representation across the full spectrum of personnel, including the following:
• Hourly employees
• Salaried employees
• Production employees (manufacturing or service)
• Front office administrative employees (e.g., purchasing, accounting, human resources)
• Engineering and technical employees

The personal attributes previously discussed are the most important selection criteria for internal auditors. If you’re able, also strive for diversity of backgrounds, experience, and organizational roles. Your audit team will be stronger and more flexible.

Training for internal auditors

When you believe you have a solid team of auditor candidates, the next obligation is training them. Auditing is not a process that many people are naturally good at. They need exposure to the full range of auditing tools and techniques, with opportunities to practice them under supervised conditions. Training provided solely online is seldom going to be effective. Neither will classroom training all by itself.

Standard requirements: When ISO 9001:2026 is published, nearly all internal auditors—even the experienced ones—will require additional training on the particulars of the new standard. The challenge is that ISO 9001 isn’t getting clearer; it’s getting more muddled and confusing with every revision and amendment. This of course trickles down to every other QMS standard that’s based on ISO 9001. Auditor training needs to cover standard requirements in detail, with an emphasis on practical interpretations.

Audit procedure: The audit procedure is the document that describes how an audit should take place at your organization. Every internal audit program needs a concise and tool-based audit procedure that will help internal auditors succeed. Training needs to cover this procedure, especially regarding the expectations of auditors.

Preparing for an audit: You don’t just wake up one morning and start doing an audit. There’s a significant amount of preparation that must happen even for a relatively short audit of a few hours. This includes refreshing yourself on the procedures in the department you’ll be auditing, and developing some preliminary audit trails. It could also include developing an audit checklist.

Interviewing techniques: At its heart, auditing is nothing more than a friendly conversation with a very specific objective: to gather evidence that indicates conformity. As such, there are some methods to this conversation, which we’ll label “interview techniques.” The better your auditor’s interviewing techniques, the smoother the audit will go.

Audit requirements: Audit requirements are the full set of criteria you can use during the audit. They include standard requirements, procedures, policies, work instructions, and contracts that have been adopted by the company. Opinions of the auditor never constitute requirements.

Objective evidence: This is what you’re seeking during the audit. It’s the factual, unbiased, and verifiable proof that we either met or did not meet the audit requirements. Sometimes it’s easy to get objective evidence mixed up with subjective evidence.

Matching evidence to requirements: One of the keys to auditing is matching evidence to requirements. It’s a relatively simple task once auditors understand the logic and have had some practice with it. Failure to match evidence to requirements means that the auditor is just casting about and wasting everybody’s time.

Writing nonconformities: Writing is a difficult task no matter what the context. Writing audit nonconformities is an especially difficult task because you’re balancing detail with brevity; you’ve got to state the facts, but you can’t write a book. The fact that some people believe they’re being personally evaluated during an audit raises the stakes even further.

Conducting opening and closing meetings: The bookends of the audit are the opening and closing meetings. Auditors need to understand how to conduct these meetings in a dignified and professional way, yet still retain personal warmth. Closing meetings are especially important because this is where we officially discuss the audit results.

Audit reporting: The written output of the internal audit is what we refer to as “audit reporting.” The audit report must be clear, concise, and no longer than absolutely necessary. It takes some practice to achieve this.

The link to corrective action: There’s a direct and critical connection between internal auditing and corrective action. Internal auditors must understand the corrective action system just as well as they understand auditing.

Following up on audit findings: Finally, auditors need to be trained on how to follow up and close out audit findings. This is one of the most neglected phases of the audit process, because it takes place well after the onsite audit is completed.

Don’t burn out your auditors

It’s human nature to use your best resources. If you have a patch of ground that produces great tomatoes, it’s tempting to keep planting tomatoes there, year after year. The only problem is that the soil eventually becomes exhausted. This is the case with an internal audit program, too. Experienced and well-trained auditors produce effective results, so they frequently are called on to perform audits. As a result, the organization fails to develop new auditors, and they end up with no auditors when the experienced auditors run out of gas and scream, “No more!”

One of the best strategies is to make each auditor’s “tour of duty” a year and a half. Train a new group of auditors annually, and then use the remaining six months for the experienced auditors to mentor the new group. Schedule auditors in teams of two, one new auditor and one experienced. That way, the new auditors get the benefit of observing the seasoned auditors in action, and the seasoned auditors can learn from the new perspectives and unburdened approaches employed by the new auditors.

After a few years of rotating in new groups of auditors, you will have utilized a significant chunk of your employees. The benefits of doing this are clear:
• Broad exposure of personnel to other functions in the organizations
• Deeper understanding of the management system and its processes
• Stronger communication and analysis skills as a result of auditing experience
• Varied perspectives and viewpoints that come from using a wide range of personnel as auditors
• Less likelihood that the audit process will fall victim to groupthink, which happens when the same people always are involved
• You’ll have an informal “alumni association” of ex-auditors who can be called on to perform audits periodically in a pinch

Don’t settle for less than the best when you assemble your internal audit team. Sell the program enthusiastically to impressive auditor candidates, and clearly communicate all the benefits that can accrue to auditors who carry out this important role. Internal auditors with strong personal attributes—combined with effective training—will become engines of improvement.