3 replies to this topic

[zoelawton]

Hi everyone. This has been a question on my mind for well over a year now, and it's been left there due to Covid. In the far future (i'm still quite young) i would love to be a consultant. I have completed an internal auditing course and next year hope to complete the BRC auditing course. HOWEVER, I know experience is everything and I really want to carry out some work experience, and unfortunately the opportunity for that isn't great at my site. Am I allowed to take on work experience with auditors or is this a massive no for confidentiality reasons? I have the lovely premonition of contacting an auditor, asking if I can join in on their next audit and pop along for a day or 2 to a site and observe the audit. If someone could put me out of my misery and let me know, and what I can do otherwise to gain actual auditing experience, that would be great. 

 

 

[SQFconsultant]

If you are thinking about entering the wonderful world of food safety certification consulting I would highly suggest you consider becoming a full blown auditor first for least a couple of years.

 

You may or may not be able to shadow someone due to disclosure issues with CB's and their clients as well as the Auditor and seriously, you need the eyes of an Auditor to be an all around consultant.

 

One of our big selling points is that we were auditors first - we get what auditors are looking for and how they go about the getting of that information.

 

You will find the experience priceless and as a consultant you will find your expertise to be greatly enhanced and a major added value to your clients.

[zoelawton]

Thanks for this!

 

Just a disclosure - i didn't intend for this to suggest i wanted to shadow audits and then become a consultant... i completely get that i need to audit first! But until i'm at that step experience anywhere is good!

 

I will check with some known auditors regarding shadowing etc.!

[pHruit]

It might be worth looking up some 2nd party auditors - I expect you may have issues with the 3rd party CBs due to confidentiality issues, as Glenn mentioned.

It's not an ideal time for auditing but hopefully it will get back to normal as restrictions ease. If your employer ever commissions any 2nd party audits then it's worth seeing if you can tag along with those, too.

 

The other question is, how attached are you to your current job? One way to get a lot of experience would be to move towards one of the larger food businesses that maintain a specific technical team (or part thereof) for raw materials, some of whom will be almost full-time auditing their supplier base. A junior position in something like this would get you lots of audit experience and in some cases this could be across quite a wide range of industry sectors too. Just be wary that some have a relatively comfy life and do 1-2 audits a week with a day for travel each side of things, and others will e.g. fly to a country on a Sunday, do five audits in five days with the travel between each one in the evenings, then fly back Friday night/Saturday morning, and it can be extremely tough work. Good for building experience though