Les juniors auditeurs ont-ils un background de soft skills adéquat pour permettre une bonne intégration sur le terrain

Abstract

In the economic context of the past two decades, where the collapse of giant international companies led to the 2008 financial crisis, the audit profession was highly criticized due to the lack of rigor during audits. Audit firms were accused to ignore big issues in the accounts of their clients, allowing them to use accounting loopholes in order to hide billion of debts or significantly increase their revenues. As a result, investors lost trust toward the accounts of the companies, even with the audit firm stamp, which froze the economy. The audit profession was reformed and new standards were created in order to prevent such disasters to happen again. Tighten up the audit standards led to longer and heavier audit processes, which sometimes creates tensions between the auditor and his client, who finds the audit too invasive. In order to face these growing tensions with their clients, the auditors have to acquire additional skills on top of their technical skills if they want to keep a good relation with them. These skills are called « soft skills » and relate to competencies such as communication, adaptability or team working. This thesis aims to analyze the background of the young graduated in terms of « soft skills » and determine whether their school curriculum and trainings received from their employer are appropriate to prepare them to maintain good relations with their clients during the audit. To this end, an empirical approach is adopted, which consists in both a quantitative and qualitative analysis among recently graduated professionals working as financial auditors. The results are analyzed and compared to the existing literature on this topic in order draw conclusions and recommendations on the research question. It appears that the young graduated consider that their « soft skills » background when arriving on the field is not sufficient and that they are not ready to handle a relation with the clients. In addition, the importance of the « soft skills » seems to be increasing and becoming even more essential to the profession that the technical knowledge. Finally, five recommendations are drawn up and are addressed to both academic and professional bodies.