Articles Brad Schafer, PHD, CIA Sep 30, 2025
To attract the next generation of internal auditors, educators and practitioners must help students build skills and experience, and show them how the profession can be a rewarding career.
Attracting talented practitioners is key to keeping the internal audit profession strong and growing. Survey findings from The IIA’s recent North American Pulse of Internal Audit reports offer insights that both audit leaders and educators can use to support the next generation of internal auditors.
Salary is the top hurdle to hiring, according to CAEs surveyed for the 2024 Pulse Report, a finding that is a common challenge for many professions. Yet, beyond salary, CAEs note a range of other obstacles, including a lack of competencies (17%), applicants (15%), and experience in the profession (12%), as well as greater competition for audit talent (7%). By working together, CAEs and educators can help students build the skills they need to have successful internal audit careers (see “Academic–Practitioner Conversation Points” on this page).
What core competencies do students need to enter the profession? This could be the most difficult, and most important, question for CAEs and professors to answer. Educators need to ensure students are learning valuable skills, while audit leaders must have reasonable expectations about graduates’ skill levels.
The IIA’s Model Curriculum and the Internal Audit Academic Alliance should be important parts of this conversation. The Model Curriculum can help define the basic skills internal audit professionals need. Educators should compare the Model Curriculum to the courses they are teaching in their university’s program to identify learning gaps.
If the university’s curriculum already includes some topics related to internal auditing, educators can work with practitioners and their local IIA chapter or national institute to join The Institute’s Internal Audit Academic Alliance. The alliance is open to universities ranging from those that cover internal audit topics in a single course to colleges that offer a full degree program in internal auditing. Audit leaders who want a university to add a specific course can help by becoming guest lecturers or teaching the course as an adjunct professor.
Internal auditors can help educators learn how new technologies are used in practice. For example, inviting a practitioner to demonstrate robotic process automation in my class helped me create hands-on projects with clear learning goals to prepare students to use the technology, themselves.
Internal auditors also can give professors a clearer view of how audit plans are expanding and the skills internal audit functions need the most. According to the 2025 Pulse report, compliance with the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 remains a major responsibility for most CAEs at publicly traded companies. However, the report identifies 14 other areas in respondents’ audit plans. Among these areas, operational auditing stands out, making up 19% of the average audit plan.
Additionally, internal auditors can tell educators how the role of the CAE is changing. The 2025 Pulse report notes that 89% of CAEs say they now have responsibilities beyond traditional internal audit areas.
Getting internal auditors involved in course assignments also can help students build audit skills. For example, practitioners recently joined my class to talk about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) audits. Afterwards, each student reviewed a sample audit report and presented how he or she would audit the company’s ESG assertions, with professionals judging the presentations.
In working together in the classroom, matching the right practitioner to the right academic is crucial. For example, an internal auditor with two to five years of experience is well-suited for demonstrating a hands-on audit procedure, while a CAE would be a good guest lecturer about managing an internal audit function.
If internal audit positions aren’t attracting enough applicants, it’s worth asking whether the workload and career path appeal to today’s graduates. To spark student interest, CAEs and educators need to change the narrative related to the profession’s “lifestyle.”
Some internal auditors choose to work long hours because they love what they do. Yet as work-life balance has become increasingly important, many internal audit functions offer flexible work programs and varying long-term career options that may be more desirable to students.
Here are examples of how practitioners are balancing work with their personal lives:
Professors can help students take a long-term view of internal auditing by connecting them with practitioners. One way I’ve done this is through a mentoring program that pairs graduate students with experienced auditors for three focused, 30-minute conversations about career planning. The goal is to help students explore the wide array of opportunities for people with internal audit skills.
This is an example of how professors can share stories with students about life in the profession. Practitioners, in turn, should offer examples of how they balance audit work with personal fulfillment.
To further broaden students’ perspectives, professors and internal auditors should encourage them to take elective courses in fields such as information systems and information security. For students pursuing majors other than auditing and accounting, guest lectures by internal auditors can show how an internal audit elective class might lead to a career in the profession.
How can internal auditors and universities provide students with internal audit experience they need to enter the profession? Internship programs are more likely to be successful if the school, faculty, and employer have a reasonable expectation for what students will learn and contribute.
Many colleges offer credit for experiential learning. That said, the student and employer must enroll in the “internship course.” This ensures the student has the right knowledge, can complete tasks with supervision, and can finish a required assignment for a grade.
Part-time or temporary employment with an internal audit function is another option to help students gain experience. For example, Kennesaw State University’s Project, Bench, and Job program allows companies to hire students as contractors for short-term projects. The program does not guarantee students a permanent job with those companies.
Can internal auditors sell the profession to students in the face a competitive market for talent? Internal audit functions aren’t just competing with other organizations for the next generation of practitioners, they are competing with professions such as accounting, IT, operations, and cybersecurity. Today’s graduates have many career-path options.
The internal audit profession might not be for everyone. However, practitioners should tell students why internal auditors have the best seat in the business house. That “elevator speech” should include three points.
Profession. Internal audit is a profession rather than an industry, and that not-so-simple distinction is a way to attract the right talent to the profession. For example, I am a member of The IIA, and I encourage my students to join The Institute, too — student membership is free in North America. I volunteer on the academic relations committee of my local IIA chapter and invite my students to attend or volunteer at chapter events. All these activities help introduce students to the profession.
Strategic Advisor. Practitioners and professors should have conversations to clearly articulate the meaning of strategic advisor in a way that resonates with college students. Organizations increasingly ask internal audit to help them manage risk across the business. Talking to students about advisory projects that are proactive or requested by business units will help students see how organizations rely on internal audit as a strategic advisor.
Salary. Over the past few years, internal audit salaries have become more competitive and more attractive to students. According to Robert Half’s Finance and Accounting Salaries and Trends: 2025 Salary Guide, the median salary for an entry-level internal auditor position in Atlanta is $67,725, rising to a median salary of $110,994 for a senior internal auditor. Long-term, CAEs have high earning potential relative to leadership positions in other professions, with a median salary of $213,925 in Atlanta.
Having detailed conversations with internal auditors can be difficult if professors do not feel they are as knowledgeable about current audit practices as practitioners. Both parties should view these discussions as open learning opportunities. Educators can learn about new trends and technologies to add to their courses and curricula, while practitioners can learn about core competencies internal audit students are learning.
Deeper conversations between practitioners and educators can help develop solutions for the four talent acquisition issues facing the profession. In turn, the fruits of these discussions could help grow the profession by attracting the next generation of internal auditors.