During onboarding, we sometimes hear our engineers say they hesitated to apply for the position earlier in their career because they weren’t ready to live up to the Schuberg Philis standard. Knowing our focus is on mission-critical environments and many of our customers run the Netherlands’ most vital processes, they felt we wouldn’t allow just anyone to be given a position of such responsibility. Schuberg Philis does hire seasoned professionals, yet we are realistic about today’s hiring market. We know that there’s a shortage of talent, that young people are more diverse, ambitious, and multitalented than ever, and that we want this new generation to grow as leaders.
This past half-year, our audit team was assisted by two exceptional students: a Master’s student in crisis and security management gaining work experience as an audit assistant and a Bachelor’s student in safety and security management doing an internship on privacy. Besides making lasting impact on our team, both embraced the Schuberg Philis mindset: an entrepreneurial attitude, a structured approach to problem-solving, and an openness to make their voices count within the company. Today these former students are our first audit trainees.
The right person
As a team, Schuberg Philis auditors well understand the technical complexities of our 20+ customer teams, each of whom uses their own unique cloud setup and set of tools. But as individual auditors, did we need to know the ins and outs of all of them from day one? Not at all. This is why our main hiring requirement is not that someone has to be an experienced professional, but rather that they be the right person for the job. Applying this criterion has introduced us to many new opportunities – and faces.
Setting out to find the right person for the job lets us ask: can we differentiate work so different talents with different levels of experience can all contribute in a purposeful way? Which parts of a project require which types of expertise? Is that expertise something we need from day one, or can we cultivate it in and with the younger talent we hire? And by valuing eagerness over experience, can we not benefit from what young people can teach us? The answer is yes!
Post-traineeship careers
Our Schuberg Philis Audit Traineeship provides a full-time salary and all the other benefits our colleagues get. The two-year program emphasizes training, including the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) certification, but the greatest focus is learning on the job. Since we audit the majority of our customer teams on a yearly basis, our trainees will have the time to audit most teams at least twice, thereby growing their role in the audits and tracking how customer teams evolve as IT evolves. The program will develop trainees across key technical skills entailing auditing, security, data analysis, and public cloud as well as soft skills, such as communication with stakeholders and learning to collaborate across competencies. Our in-built intervision system will ensure reflection and self-reflection are part of the program, and our coaches and buddies are excited to help support the trainees.
We believe that the Schuberg Philis Audit Traineeship will help turn our trainees into auditors eventually capable of performing audits themselves. The program will also hone their ability to set dots on their post-traineeship career horizons within Schuberg Philis. And above all, we hope it will help foster the next generation’s personal development and capacity to use IT for good in the world.
Know someone who would be an ideal audit trainee – or could that person be you? Want more details on the Schuberg Philis Audit Traineeship? Contact Maikel de Maertelaere.