Consulting Case Presentations 2026: Who Is Watching

Six case presentation requirements, two clocks, two audiences

Presentations are named often and described almost never. Here is every mention in our corpus with whatever detail came with it.

Two of the six give a clock. Two give an audience. None of the six publishes what medium you may use, how many slides are expected, or how the readout is weighted against the rest of the day.

Two of the six are also hedged. PA Consulting writes that an intermediate stage "could be an application review by areas of our business, a technical assessment, or we may ask you to prepare a presentation on a particular topic." The same firm lists presentations again among the exercises a later assessment day "will typically include." So the requirement appears twice on one page and is conditional both times.

Roland Berger appears twice in the table for a different reason. Its Dutch page describes a case readout to a panel; its global tips page describes a two to three minute presentation about yourself. Those are separate exercises at separate stages, and treating either as the firm's presentation format would be wrong about the other.

A case presentation to fifty people, or to a panel of four

The two published audiences describe entirely different events.

Accenture Australia, in a post by one of its own early careers recruiters, writes: "You'll be expected to work together to develop a presentation of around 5-10 minutes about your case study and your proposed plan. Your group will present to a group of around 30-50 people, then respond to questions from the assessors."

Roland Berger's Netherlands page describes the other extreme: "You will then present your findings to a panel of four consultants of Roland Berger Amsterdam."

Dividing 30 by 4 gives 7.5, so the smaller of Accenture's published range is already seven and a half times the Dutch panel. At the low end you are in a conversation. At the high end you are on a stage, in front of candidates who are also competing, and the questions come from assessors rather than from the audience.

One first-hand account sits further along the same axis. Roman Fernandez, later a senior consultant at Roland Berger, told the trade press that his December 2016 Chicago final gave him 45 minutes of "case presentation and discussion which was attended by a senior partner and a senior consultant." Forty-five minutes to two people. Dividing 45 by 10 gives 4.5, so that readout was four and a half times the upper end of Accenture's published slot, to an audience one twentieth the size. One person, one office, nine years ago.

The published day, minute by minute

Only one source in the corpus publishes a full assessment day timetable, and it is worth adding up.

Accenture Australia's post gives the sequence: "the day will start with a 30-minute welcome presentation by the day's coordinator. Then you'll be split into breakout groups and given half an hour or so to get to know each other a bit. After a short break, you'll go back into your breakout groups and then be presented with the case study for around 1.5 hours to discuss and form your ideas."

Adding those blocks by hand gives 30 plus 30 plus 90 minutes of groundwork, then up to 10 minutes of presentation, which is 160 minutes. That is two hours and 40 minutes, and it excludes the break and the assessors' questions.

Two ratios come out of those numbers. The readout is 10 of 160 minutes, so 6.25 percent of the published day. And the group spends 90 minutes working to produce 10 minutes of speech, a ratio of 9 to 1.

The recruiter's own warning follows from that arithmetic: "make sure you allow enough time to prepare the final presentation and, ideally, have a practice run through." A group that argues for 85 of its 90 minutes has built nothing it can deliver.

Two to three minutes about yourself

One firm sets homework for a behavioral interview, and nobody else in our corpus does. Roland Berger's tips page reads: "If you're aiming to start as a Junior Consultant, please prepare a two- to three-minute presentation about yourself for your personal fit interview."

Three things are worth reading closely. It is conditional on one job title. It is prepared in advance rather than improvised. And it is the shortest published speaking slot in the corpus, at a quarter of Accenture Australia's lower bound.

What the firm does not publish is the brief. No topic list, no structure, no criterion, and no statement of whether it is scored separately from the interview around it. The requirement is opposable; the specification is absent.

If your invitation carries that line, the only safe reading is the literal one: two to three minutes, about yourself, prepared. Running four minutes against a published ceiling of three is a self-inflicted problem on the one exercise where the clock was given to you in advance.

The questions after a case presentation, and who rates them

Two sources publish that questions follow the readout. Neither says what they are worth.

Accenture Australia is explicit about the order: present, then "respond to questions from the assessors." The same post gives the substantive instruction that sits behind those questions: "Don't just present the solution, show the steps you went through on the way to reach your suggested course of action."

The scoring frame comes from the publisher instead of the firms. SHL's candidate page describes the mechanism: "During an assessment, a group of candidates takes part in a range of exercises, which are observed by assessors. The assessors rate the performance of the candidates against the competencies required for the job."

The same page answers the question every candidate asks after a bad ten minutes: "If there is more than one exercise, you will have other opportunities to show what you can do. If you feel you have performed poorly on one exercise don't give up. Your performance across all of them will be taken into account." That sentence belongs to SHL, and it says nothing about any individual employer's threshold.

SHL adds one warning that cuts against most presentation advice: "Don't make assumptions about how you should respond. If you try to guess what the assessors are looking for you may be wrong." The competency framework belongs to the employer, and no employer in this corpus publishes it.

One half day with no case presentation at all

The counterexample matters, because it stops this page from generalizing. Capgemini Invent's UK assessment centre contains no candidate presentation.

The firm describes it as "a half-day engaging event consisting of a group exercise and a 1:1 strengths based interview." It goes on: "The assessment centre also includes ice breakers where candidates can get to know each other and a short presentation with more information around Capgemini Invent and the pathway that the candidates have applied to."

The only presentation named on that day is the firm's, delivered to the candidates. There is also no case. So a sentence claiming that a consulting assessment day ends with a presentation of your case is false for this named firm, in writing, on its own page.

Strategy& UK adds a second variant. Its structured case gives you "a case study with a slide pack" and about ten minutes to read it, then asks you to talk. You consume slides without producing any. Three firms, three completely different relationships between a candidate and a deck.

A rehearsal split for ten minutes

Since one duration is published, rehearse against it. The split below is ours rather than any firm's, and the arithmetic is on the table so you can check it.

Those minutes add to 10.0 and those shares add to 100 percent, which is the only check that matters: 10 plus 40 plus 20 plus 15 plus 15 comes to exactly 100.

Half the ten minutes goes to the answer and the reasons it holds, one minute plus four, which is the structure Deloitte describes when it asks candidates to "Structure your analysis into a clear, logical story. Present your findings and recommendations coherently and logically."

Our own synthesis rubric puts the same shape in weights: Answer first 35 out of 100, Evidence 25, Risk 20, Next step 20. Those four are ours, read from our code, and no firm publishes a comparable scheme. The reasoning is on how an answer is assessed and the synthesis drill runs free and without an account from the tools page. It rehearses the opening and the close; it cannot rehearse a room of fifty people.

What no firm publishes about the case presentation

Five gaps, and each one is a question you should put to your recruiter rather than guess.

No firm publishes the medium. Slides, paper, flipchart or whiteboard: not one of the six sources says what you may use. The single documented case is a ban on slides reported by a candidate in 2016.

No firm publishes who speaks in a group. Accenture Australia describes a group presentation and never says whether every member must present, which is the first thing a group of six will argue about.

No firm publishes how long to spend preparing the readout. The one piece of guidance is to allow enough time, with no figure attached.

No firm publishes what the questions afterwards are worth. Two sources confirm they happen. Neither weights them against the presentation itself.

And no employer publishes the competency framework the assessors are rating against. SHL says the framework belongs to the job, and the employers keep it. For the writing that usually precedes the readout see written case interviews, for the whole assessed day see the assessment center written case, and for the group exercise that feeds it see group case interviews.