Should you Invest in Training your Employees to be ISO9001, AS9100, ISO13485 or IATF16949 Internal Auditors or Hire a 3rd Party Auditor?
My experience has been if you train your employees to be internal auditors usually, they take the experience and run. They stay at your company a year or two then start looking elsewhere for more money and/or better benefits. When your trained internal auditors, your employees are auditing their friends and find their friend aren’t following the process your internal auditor doesn’t state the process is not being followed in their internal audit report. Your internal auditor does not write a corrective action so no one knows there is an issue. Therefore, your internal audits are not effective.
Do you struggle to keep your internal auditors after they are trained?
If your employee goes through Lead Auditor training, they even more valuable to your company and other companies out there looking to hire someone to lead their Quality Management System (QMS). Chances are you probably don’t want to send your employee to a Lead Auditor course.
Hire a 3rd party auditor to do your internal audits.
Your employees get the experience of internal auditing then after a year or two they leave your company. Now you are faced with are you going to pay for someone else to be trained or is it cheaper to hire a 3rd party auditing firm like Audits4u.com then continue to train employees to audit your system. Also, when you hire a 3rd party to do your internal audit, you hire a fresh pair of eyes that are not friends with anyone.
Regardless if your company is ISO9001, AS9100, ISO13485 or IATF16949 every standard requires you to perform internal audits. Who does your internal audits are up to you. Will you choose to continue training employees or go out and look for a 3rd party auditor?