What Skills Are Needed To Become a Food Safety Auditor?

A food safety auditor is a professional that inspects food in restaurants, grocery stores, and other businesses that serve food. Their primary concern is to ensure that the food being served meets every hygiene requirement and that they are also in compliance with requirements and regulations for preparing food. 

The job of a food safety auditor requires staying away from home most times as they cannot work remotely. However, they don’t necessarily need to stay overnight. While some food safety auditors may work for the government, others work for large food corporations to ensure their internal food safety enforcement measures. 

Irrespective of where you want to work, you need to equip yourself with specific skills to stand out from the competition. In this regard, we have teamed up with professional food safety auditors from job aggregator Jooble to discuss the necessary skills you need to equip yourself to thrive in the field. Let’s dive into the details.

Active Listening Skills

If you’re passionate about trending this career path, you must also be ready to improve your listening skills to thrive in the profession. You must be able to listen to others and retain the information for later. When someone is speaking, you should listen to what they are saying until they’re done with their speech. Always resist the urge to ask questions when you’ve not been requested; your question might as well be answered during the presentation. 

An excellent active listening skill will keep both the speaker and the listener engaged in the conversation. More so, maintaining excellent listening skills will help you learn from others very quickly as it will allow you to pay close attention to details and learn fast.

Critical Thinking Skills

A good auditor is a critical thinker. You must be able to analyze arguments, observations, and facts to provide a simple solution. A food safety auditor’s expected duties are to think beyond the box and foresee the impending danger of a particular recipe. This will enable you to understand how and why certain decisions are made, alongside the ability to think of how to improve unsatisfactory situations.

Aside from the excellent critical thinking skill that will help you carry out your job effectively, it will also develop your emotional intelligence by not dueling too much on any challenge you encounter while working. A good critical thinker is solution-oriented; they can think clearly and rationally when the situation demands it. They can also develop the best organizational decisions because they have critically analyzed the case.

Decision-Making Skills

Critical thinking and decision-making go hand in hand. After you have critically analyzed a situation, next up is coming up with the best helpful decisions for your course. With this skill, you’ll be able to provide solutions to different problems by collecting additional information and considering multiple viewpoints. 

Having the right decision-making skill will improve your bond with your employees as they’ll always come to you for advice and because they have great trust in your decision. This will make you a good food safety auditor and increase the standard of your work.

Communication Skills

Good communication skills are a must-have for anyone seeking a career in this profession. They will assess a wide range of organizations dealing with food and have to convey their findings to the required authorities. 

Food safety auditors are usually saddled with the responsibility to communicate with employers, employees, farmers, and management. Hence, having this skill will help you properly convey your messages and thoughts to the correct department. You will also find this skill handy when it’s time to give feedback or make a presentation.

Knowledge Of Food Safety 

To work as a food safety auditor, you must possess vast food safety knowledge. Since food safety is all about ensuring that the food supply is safe to eat and is in order with the rules and regulations of the food regulations agency, an auditor must have a good understanding of food safety. 

More so, the trends for good protection are constantly changing. Food auditors must stay updated with the new regulations and standards to remain relevant in their work and stay on top of their game.

Food safety is categorized into four and is as listed below: 

• Time and temperature control
• Personal hygiene 
• Cross-contamination 
• Food-borne diseases 

Thus, you must deeply understand the four categories of food safety to thrive in this profession.

Problem-Solving Skills

As a food safety auditor, you must be able to identify problems, analyze them, and provide a possible way forward effectively and promptly without any impediments whatsoever. You already know deep down that the problem will not solve itself – one of the benefits of being a good problem solver is that you tend to focus on the solution rather than the problem. The earlier you begin to find a solution, the better. 

Aside from food safety, food safety auditors also use their problem-solving skills to identify potential hazards in their workplace and provide solutions to eliminate them.

Analytical Skills

One of the duties of a food safety auditor is to evaluate and analyze data. To carry out these duties, they leverage their technical knowledge on how to analyze complex issues. Analytical skills involve making difficult decisions, solving complex problems, thinking critically, and analyzing data. They use these skills to ensure that a company’s food safety practices comply with the existing rules and regulations.

Attention To Details

Every food safety auditor must be able to pay close attention to details. The reason for this is not farfetched; as a food safety auditor, you may be saddled with the responsibility to examine several documents, such as food production or employee training records. If you don’t have the necessary attentive skills, it may be hard for you to review it ideally. So, you will need this skill to identify the potential issues or inconsistencies in the documents and help you produce a perforce result.

Conclusion

The food sector is a huge one and requires a diversity of experts. A food safety auditor is another thriving career in the food sector with high demand and excellent pay. However, every individual seeking employment in the food sector must have the necessary skill set to keep them on top of their game and help them stand out from other candidates. 

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