[ShenCai FeiYang] Auditor's Competency Requirements

The implementation of audit and certification activities relies on people, such as auditors, personnel who develop certification schemes and rules, and those who make certification decisions. It can be said that people are the primary factor in certification activities. Certification bodies must ensure the quality of certification, and personnel with certification capabilities are important assets and wealth of the certification body. A person's professional ability, experience, knowledge, and more importantly, their outlook on life, values, and ethics directly affect how they view, handle, and judge issues. Especially in the process of management system certification, many requirements are qualitative. This requires auditors to accurately gauge the criteria for judgment, which largely depends on subjective understanding and judgment.

The composition of auditor competence is generally understood as personal behavior + general knowledge and skills + specific domain knowledge and skills.

Auditors should possess good moral qualities and a sense of right and wrong that conform to public ethics; they should maintain fairness, objectivity, honesty, and integrity; maintain a humble and cautious attitude; speak based on evidence without making false or untrue evaluations and conclusions; auditors should value their professional identity and status, and have a correct and clear understanding of their own knowledge, skills, and developed abilities, so as to always maintain sincerity and caution in their work.

Auditing activities are complex and diverse due to differences in audited organizations, so auditors should possess certain general knowledge and skills.

General knowledge includes: fundamentals of conformity assessment; knowledge of certification and accreditation laws and regulations; basics of management system certification; fundamentals of auditing techniques; basics of quality management tools; fundamentals of management science; knowledge of business management implementation; knowledge of client products and services, processes, and organizations; professional knowledge of client business fields; knowledge of scientific research and teaching.

Basic skills include: communication skills; logical reasoning ability; written expression ability; ability to form a complete chain of evidence; ability to use modern information technology for auditing; ability to collect, summarize, and organize information; evaluation ability; self-management ability.

Auditors engaged in various certification audits should also have specific knowledge and skill requirements related to their certification fields. These skill requirements are often related to the "technical fields" defined within a certification domain. Due to the complexity and breadth of technical fields, auditors mainly acquire specific knowledge and skills through long-term practical work and accumulation. Before conducting an audit, detailed requirements for the auditor's professional competence can be specified in the audit scheme to provide information for professional guidance before the audit and for the professional matching of the audit team.