The move from a permanent internal audit role to consultancy is something a lot of experienced auditors think about. The pitch is appealing: more variety, more control over your time, better day rates, and the chance to work across different firms and sectors rather than spending years in the same building auditing the same risks.
Some of that is true. Some of it is considerably more complicated. This is an attempt at an honest account of both.
What genuinely gets better
The variety is real. In a permanent role, even a large and complex one, you are auditing the same organisation, the same culture, the same political dynamics, the same recurring debates about the same recurring findings. In consultancy, you encounter different organisations with different approaches to the same problems, and that is genuinely instructive. You learn faster about what good looks like across a sector than you do from inside one firm.
The autonomy is also real, though it is different from what most people expect. You are not more autonomous in the sense of having more control over your working day, clients have requirements, deadlines exist, and the work still has to be done to a standard. You are more autonomous in the sense of being able to choose the work you take on, and of not being subject to the internal politics that shape every large organisation.
And the breadth of exposure is valuable if you invest in it. The risk of consultancy is that you do the same type of work for different clients rather than genuinely expanding your range. The opportunity is to deliberately seek out engagements that push into areas you have not covered before.
What is harder than it looks
The commercial side of running an independent practice is the thing that most people underestimate. Finding clients, managing relationships, handling invoicing and payment, planning for gaps between engagements, none of this is difficult in the sense of requiring unusual skill, but all of it takes time and attention that in a permanent role is handled by someone else. If you find administrative work genuinely draining, that is worth taking seriously before making the move.
The absence of a team is also real. In a permanent role, you have colleagues, people to sense-check your thinking, share the load on a difficult audit, and provide the background noise of professional life. In consultancy, you work alone most of the time, or with client staff who are not your colleagues in the same sense. This suits some people very well. It does not suit everyone.
And the income variability is real, even when you are experienced and well-networked. There will be gaps, between engagements, during holiday periods, when a client relationship ends unexpectedly. The financial planning required is more active than in a salaried role, and the tolerance for uncertainty needs to be higher.
What does not change
The work itself is fundamentally the same. You are still assessing risk, evaluating controls, forming evidence-based conclusions, and communicating findings to people who would often prefer not to hear them. The technical skills that made you good at internal audit in a permanent role are the same skills that make you useful to clients. The professional standards, independence, objectivity, competence, apply just as much when you are working for a fee as when you are employed.
The credibility question also does not change. In consultancy, your credibility comes from your track record, your references, and the quality of your work, exactly as it does in a permanent role. The difference is that in a permanent role, your credibility is partly institutional. In consultancy, it is entirely personal. That is motivating for some people and uncomfortable for others.
Timing the move
The question of when to make the move matters more than most people acknowledge. Moving into consultancy with five years of experience and a strong professional network is very different from moving with fifteen. The depth of your technical knowledge, the breadth of your sector experience, and the quality of your relationships all affect how quickly you can establish yourself and how much choice you have over the work you take on.
Moving too early, before you have developed genuine depth in at least one specialist area, means you compete on price rather than expertise, which is a difficult position to sustain. Moving too late is less common but also real: some people wait until the permanent role is genuinely intolerable, which is not the best foundation for a considered career decision.
If you are thinking about making the move, the most useful thing you can do before committing is have honest conversations with people who have already done it, not just the ones who are visibly successful, but the ones who found it harder than expected. Both perspectives are informative.
