Is It Them? (Part 1): Working with your Audit Senior

IS IT THEM? Working With Your Audit Senior

A guide for first- and second-year auditors learning to tell a demanding relationship from a genuine problem

Your senior shapes your first two years more than almost anyone else at the firm. Most are doing their best under real pressure, juggling their own work, reviewing yours, and often two or three other juniors at once. That doesn't make you any less confused when review points keep multiplying, feedback feels vague, or you're too afraid to ask a question in case you sound incompetent.

This guide helps you make sense of what's actually happening on both sides of that relationship. The things nobody explains to you, translated by someone who's sat on both sides of the desk. It doesn't excuse poor behaviour, and it doesn't assume the worst about someone who's simply overwhelmed with work or was never trained how to coach. Just honest insight into what you're actually dealing with, and what to do about it.

What's inside:

Module 1: "I Don't Know What My Senior Wants"

Review points keep multiplying. Instructions keep changing. This module shows you how to tell an evolving audit apart from a real communication gap, and what to do about the extra hours it costs you.

Module 2: "I Need My Senior, But I Feel Like I'm Annoying Them"

A reply takes hours, or doesn't come at all. Find out what's really going on when that happens, and learn how to ask questions that make both your lives easier.

Module 3: "I Worked So Hard, But My Senior Still Wasn't Happy"

Hard work doesn't always lead to a strong appraisal. This module explains why, how to read criticism that stings without spiralling, and how to walk away from it stronger.

Every module gives you three things: a real situation you're probably facing right now, a decode of what's actually going on - both on the audit side and in your own head, and exactly what I'd tell you to do if you were sitting across from me as my own staff.

What makes this guide valuable

Most resources teach you how to audit. This one decodes what it is actually like to be an auditor: the unwritten rules, the silences, the vague feedback. I've lived every side of it. Eighteen years in audit, from assistant to partner, plus training as a professional counsellor and adult educator on top of that. I've been the junior thinking those anxious thoughts. I've also been the senior coaching my own juniors. I know exactly what's happening in both places, and this guide turns that into something practical.

This is Part 1 of the Is It Them? guides, the follow-up to Is This Normal?: Finding Your Footing as a First-Year Audit Assistant.

Part 2: Working With Your Manager and Partner and Part 3: Your Firm, Your Career and the Audit Profession are on their way. Do look out for them in my store.