Communication Training for Auditor General’s Staff
The Auditor General’s office wants to make its reports more user-friendly. Simply put, it is so that the lay man and woman can easily understand and use the documents. So, this week they partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank for a three-day training course. Twenty-three staff members of the Auditor General’s Office learnt new and innovative methods for effective communication and report writing in order to improve the performance of the Auditor General’s office when providing oversight of public spending. The course which ended on Wednesday was facilitated by a visiting communications expert. Here’s more from the training.
Sarah MacFadyen, Communication Consultant & Trainer
“It is specifically for auditors. It is all about helping them take all that important information they have and expressing it in a way that anyone can understand and most importantly the public. We live in society where we have short attention spans where all we want to know what we know as quickly as we can. And it is about taking that information delivering it to the public in a way they understand and understand the importance of it change.”
Dorothy Bradley, Auditor General
“For my office, it is extremely important because it is not just what we say but how we say what we say. So, we need to be concise and we need to be able to communicate so that those people out there, the people we report to, can better understand what we are trying to say.”
Ernesto Thimbrel, Database Administrator, Auditor General’s Office
“Some of the skills we learnt focused on making writing more appealing to your audience. So, you have to think about who your audience will be and how what you are writing will affect them and what is it that they will care about what you are writing. Additionally, we looked at ways to edit the material that we are writing; we also looked at using infographics to make our reports more appealing. I do believe that these tools will help the average person to appreciate what it is that the office of the Auditor General does and that they will walk away with a clearer understanding of our reports.”