Case Competition Example 2026: One Firm's Full Calendar

One case competition example, milestone by milestone

Monitor Deloitte's Spanish practice publishes a competition it calls the Monitor Challenge, and gives it five dated milestones.

Three of those intervals are exact and one is not, and the reason is worth stating. From February 2 to February 8 is 6 days. From February 9 to February 15 is 6 days. From registration closing to the deliverable being due, February 2 to February 15, is 13 days. The last interval cannot be given in days, because the page prints no year anywhere and February runs to 28 or 29 depending on which one it is. So we write three to four weeks and refuse to invent a number.

That absent year is the main defect of the source, and it is the kind that traps a reader arriving a season late. The only dating anchor the page gives is its eligibility line, which aims the competition at students finishing their studies in 2027.

The entry rules put your CV in the HR system

Four conditions, all published, and each one disqualifies people who assume otherwise.

1. Team size. The firm says students "must work in teams of 3-4 people" and repeats it: "participants must register in teams of 3-4 people." There is no solo entry.
2. Study year. The competition "is aimed at bachelor's or master's students finishing their studies in 2027."
3. Language. "The competition will be conducted entirely in English, so applicants must be fluent in both English and Spanish." Both languages, and the working language is the one that is not local.
4. Documents. "Each participant must complete a form to indicate your background and your team. Additionally, you will need to register through the Deloitte HR system to provide us with your CV."

Read the fourth one twice. Entering this competition means putting a CV into the firm's recruiting system. So it is a recruiting channel with a competition attached rather than a competition with a recruiting bonus, and your CV is being read from the moment you register. The file mechanics that apply are the same ones covered in the consulting resume template guide.

Note also that there is an initial selection. Not every registered team receives an invitation, which the February 8 milestone makes explicit. So the first thing judged is the form and the CV, before any case work happens.

The final extends the round one case, so build for it

The firm describes the shape: "The challenge is structured in 2 national rounds," with the final being to "Solve an extension of the round 1 case at our offices in Madrid."

An extension of the first case, rather than a new one. That single word changes how a team should work in the preliminary round. Whatever structure and assumptions you build in the six days to February 15 will be the foundation you are asked to extend in Madrid, in front of the firm's people. A framework that got you through round one on presentation will not survive being pushed a level deeper.

So the preliminary deliverable should be built to be extended. Write down the assumptions explicitly, keep the arithmetic visible rather than buried in a calculation you cannot reproduce, and record what you deliberately excluded and why. A team that arrives in Madrid unable to say why it assumed a 12% penetration rate has a problem that no amount of slide polish fixes.

The firm also tells you who is in the room: participants "will work side-by-side with Monitor Deloitte professionals and present your work to strategy managers." So the audience for the final is practitioners rather than a panel of academics, and the questions will be about the decision rather than about the method.

Six days, planned

The case arrives February 9 and is due February 15. Here is a plan for those six days, built to the extension requirement above. This is our own construction rather than anything the firm publishes.

1. Day one. Read the prompt twice and write one sentence naming the decision the client faces. Then write the equation that governs it. Do not open a spreadsheet.
2. Day two. Build the structure from the equation and split the branches across the team, one owner each. Agree the assumptions list as a shared document with a named owner per assumption.
3. Days three and four. Do the arithmetic. Each owner writes their own calculation in full, with units, and a second team member redoes it independently from the same inputs before it goes in.
4. Day five. Write the recommendation first, in one sentence with the number that drives it, then the risk that would change it, then the first step. Build the document backwards from that.
5. Day six. Stress it. One team member plays the manager and asks why for every assumption. Anything that cannot be defended in two sentences gets a footnote or gets cut.

The step that teams skip is the independent recomputation on days three and four. It is also the one that matters most in front of practitioners, because an arithmetic slip in a presentation to people who do this daily ends the conversation.

A case competition is not a workshop

Two other formats get called competitions and are not. The distinction matters because they do different things for you.

The OC&C virtual case workshop describes itself as a session with firm members "introducing the "case" interview format used for recruiting at OC&C, and example cases to help you ace your interviews in the fall," and restricts itself to "Associate Consultant roles (both full-time and internship)."

Charles River Associates runs a session it calls Case Closed, whose published purpose is to "learn firsthand from our recruiting team how to tackle case-style interview questions."

If you have to pick one and your interviews are close, the workshop is the higher-value hour, because it is the firm telling you about its own format. If your interviews are a year out, the competition is worth six days, because it is the only published format where you do the work end to end.

What a case competition is worth on a CV

Here the honest answer is thinner than the advice market suggests. No firm in our reading names case competitions in its CV criteria, and one firm's list of valued experiences leaves them out entirely.

Roland Berger's application FAQ names what it wants to see: "study abroad, entrepreneurial ventures, charitable projects or internships, where you've demonstrated robust analytical and strategic skills, team work and creativity." Four families, and a competition is in none of them. The firm does not say a competition is worthless. It simply does not name one.

What is published is how to describe the line once you have it. Alvarez & Marsal asks candidates to distinguish projects they "participated in, led, or initiated," which for a team of four is a real distinction rather than a formality. The same page says its interviews "use behavioral-based techniques," so expect to be asked which of the four you were.

So write the line at the level that is true, with the result attached. A team that reached a national final should say so with the number of teams if the organizer publishes it. A team that was not invited past selection has a different and still usable line about a six-day piece of analysis. The bullet method is in resume action words.

What the firm leaves undefined

Five gaps on a page that is otherwise unusually precise.

1. The year. Day and month only, on all five milestones.
2. What "direct support to start their career" means. Interview access, a stage waived, or an introduction. The page does not say, and guessing would be an invention.
3. How many teams register or are invited. No number published.
4. How the deliverables are judged. No criteria, no weights, no format requirement for the submission.
5. Whether entering and losing affects a later application. Unpublished, and the CV sits in the HR system either way.

For the first four, the firm is the address. The page routes registration through the firm's HR system, which means there is a recruiting contact on the other end of it.

A sixth gap belongs to us rather than to the firm, and it is the reason this page names one competition instead of listing twenty. We could not build a verified list of firm-run case competitions in this session. The web search budget was spent, so discovery happened by reading the careers sites already recorded in our own research files, and one firm-run competition surfaced with a published calendar. Competitions organized by universities and student clubs are a separate category with a separate rights question, and this page leaves them out.

Treat that as an absence in our reading rather than evidence that few exist. If you are looking for others, the route that worked is the boring one: open the careers section of a firm you care about, find its students or early careers page, and read it rather than searching for a roundup. The roundups we would otherwise have cited are preparation platforms, and those are not sources we use.

Where the preparation actually transfers

A competition trains the whole arc at once, which is its real value and also why it is expensive in time. Our own weights say what our drills measure: in our synthesis rubric, Answer first 35 is the heaviest of four, ahead of Evidence 25, Risk 20 and Next step 20. Those four are ours, set by us and read from our own code, and no firm publishes a rubric of its own.

Those four map almost exactly onto day five of the plan above, which is why a team that drills synthesis before the case arrives writes a better document under time pressure. The synthesis drill, the structure drill and the math drill all run without an account, and the method page explains each weight. Our six case simulators are not live yet, and no drill here teaches business content.

Adjacent pages: the firms' published event calendars and statuses are in consulting recruiting events, and the referral mechanics a competition contact might lead to are in consulting referrals.

What changed on this case competition page, and when

1 October 2026. This replaces a 204-word page that described case competitions in general, named no organizer, and gave no date.

Two claims were removed. The first was that case competitions are a recognized route into consulting recruiting. No firm in our reading names them in its criteria, and one firm's published list of valued experiences excludes them, so the claim had no support. The second was a suggested preparation timeline stated as standard practice, which was our own guess. The six-day plan here is still ours and it now says so, and it is sized to a published deadline rather than to an assumption.

Added in this version: the five published milestones with the intervals recomputed by hand, the refusal to convert the last interval into days because the page prints no year, the four entry conditions including the CV in the HR system, the significance of the final being an extension of the first case, a six-day plan built to that fact, a two-column separation of competitions from workshops, and five gaps left open with the firm named as the address for four of them.