What Is Roland Berger in 2026: The Firm in Its Own Words

What Roland Berger is, in its own structured data

The most precise self-description the firm offers sits in the block of structured data served at the root of rolandberger.com, which exists so that machines can quote it. Few readers ever open it.

Two things about that last row are worth saying out loud. The figure is published as a value and as a minimum at the same time, which means the firm is giving a floor rather than a census. And it carries no measurement date, so a reader has no way to know what month it describes.

The same block names five people on the supervisory board: Robert C. Henske as Chairman, Felix Mogge as Vice Chairman, then Brandon Boyle, Constanze Schweinsteiger and Yoshihiro Suwa.

What the block does not contain matters as much. There is no revenue figure, no office count, and no country count anywhere in it. A reader who wants to know how much Roland Berger bills, or from how many cities, will not learn it from the firm. That absence is consistent with how privately held partnerships in this industry report, and we say it is an absence rather than guessing at a number.

Seventeen industries and eleven services, as it lists them

The firm sorts its work two ways, and both lists are served in the navigation that every visitor gets. Counted one by one, there are seventeen industries and eleven services.

Read the right column for what it emphasizes. Three of the eleven services name corporate distress directly: CRO Management, Interim Management, and Restructuring and Turnaround. That is a fact about the composition of the firm's own list, counted on the list itself.

The left column has its own tell. Battery and Water Management appear as industries in their own right rather than as lines inside Energy and Utilities, which is a choice the firm made about how to cut its own practice.

There is a practical use for both lists. The industry you name in a cover letter should be one of these seventeen and the service one of these eleven, because these are the words the firm uses to organize itself. One caution: the London Junior Consultant 2027 posting aligns its intake to a platform called Transaction and Investor Support, and that name appears in neither list. The posting and the navigation do not use the same vocabulary, and only the posting tells you which platform you would join.

The sentence Roland Berger repeats about who owns it

One claim appears wherever the firm describes itself, and it is about ownership. The Who we are page puts it this way: "Since our founding in Munich in 1967, Roland Berger has remained an independent partnership, owned entirely by the partners who lead your engagement. That means the people advising you have a personal stake in the quality of every recommendation and every outcome."

The same three words run through the metadata of its home page, which describes the firm as an independent partnership with German heritage and European origin. Taken together, that is the firm's answer to what distinguishes it, in its own words.

The same page carries the firm's statement of temperament, and it is unusually direct for a corporate about page. "Waiting might feel like the rational thing to do. Technologies rewire whole industries. Geopolitical shifts derail board agendas. There is always a credible case for more time." Then: "And yet. Every transformation begins with someone deciding not to wait."

Three values sit under that, each with the firm's own definition on its values page.

Two frameworks sit above the three values, a Code of conduct and a set of nine Pledges. The nine are named as a set and not listed on the page we read, so we cannot tell you what they say.

The seven career stages Roland Berger publishes

Most firms describe their ladder in vague terms. Roland Berger publishes it, rung by rung, with the content of each job attached.

That table resolves the ownership sentence into something concrete. Partner is defined as shareholder on the firm's own careers pages, which is what an independent partnership means in practice for the people inside it.

It also raises a question the firm leaves open. The published entry rung for a fresh graduate is Consulting/Business Analyst. The presentation homework described further down this page is conditioned on the title Junior Consultant. Those are two different labels for the start of a career, both published by the firm, and no page we read reconciles them. If you are applying, the title on the posting is the one that governs what you have to prepare.

What the ladder does not carry is time or money. There is no stated duration at any rung and no pay figure anywhere on it. The published and unpublished parts of compensation are set out on our Roland Berger salary page.

How Roland Berger hires, stage by stage

The firm publishes its process in several places, and the places disagree in ways worth knowing before you apply.

The global route has one gate. If your application matches, you take an online analytics test, and only passing it earns an invitation to a recruiting day. Candidates for internships skip that test and are invited straight to the day. The day itself opens with a company presentation, and then, in the firm's words, "we'll do personal fit and case interviews with you."

The FAQ puts a clock on the whole thing: "In general, the process will take around six to eight weeks (from submitting your application to signing the contract) and you should apply four to six months before your ideal start date." Applications are reviewed by a person and you should hear within three weeks. The German version of the same FAQ recommends applying six months ahead rather than four to six, which is the kind of divergence that only shows up if you read both.

The one interview count the firm publishes anywhere is in that German FAQ, and it covers internships only: a half-day selection event with one personality interview and two subject interviews. Transposing those numbers to permanent entry would be an invention, so we do not.

Individual intakes then override the global picture. The London Junior Consultant 2027 posting names five stages, Screening, Online Tests, Assessment Day and Case Study Workshop, Final Round Case Interviews, and Offer, and it dates three of them: applications close Sunday 18 October, the pre-interview case study workshop runs the week commencing 26 October, and first-round interviews are Saturday 7 November in person at the London office. It also sets an academic bar, a 2:1 equivalent or above, and commits that "every application is reviewed by a member of our (human) recruitment team".

Amsterdam runs something else again. Its careers page asks for master's graduates with high GPAs, describes a Final Day with two partners and a written case study, has you present findings to a panel of four consultants, and requires Dutch alongside English. It never mentions the online analytics test. The detail of the case exercises themselves, including the two cases the firm filmed, sits on our Roland Berger case interview guide.

The presentation it asks a Junior Consultant to prepare

Here is the single most actionable thing Roland Berger publishes, and no other firm in our reading publishes anything like it. From the hints and tips page: "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."

It applies to one job title, it names the exercise it belongs to, it sets a duration, and it stops. The firm does not say what to include, whether slides are allowed, who you deliver it to, or whether it is scored.

Treat the duration as a budget. At a comfortable spoken pace of about 130 words a minute, two to three minutes is 260 to 390 words, because 130 times 2 is 260 and 130 times 3 is 390.

At the top of every range that sums to 180 seconds, since 30 plus 70 plus 45 plus 35 is 180, which is exactly the three-minute ceiling. At the bottom it sums to 140 seconds, or two minutes twenty, which clears the floor. The arithmetic matters because the most common failure here is a candidate who prepared four minutes of material and delivers it at speed.

Three rules keep it inside the budget.

1. Cut everything before your most recent formative step unless it carries the thread. School results and hobbies cost seconds and buy nothing.
2. Put exactly one number in it. A presentation with five numbers is a report; a presentation with one is an invitation.
3. Write the last sentence first, because the last sentence is the one the interviewer will pick up, and you want it to be about the work.

The general question of how to structure a spoken behavioral answer, with the four firms that publish a structure and the four that leave you to it, is treated on the STAR method across firms. What is specific to Roland Berger is the stopwatch.

One presentation written out, to the published budget

The example below is ours, written to the word budget above. It is a demonstration, and the firm asked for a presentation about you, which by definition cannot be copied.

"I am in my final year of an economics degree and I spend two days a week as the data volunteer for a regional food charity. The thread through what I have picked is that I keep ending up in places where a number has to be defended to somebody who did not want to hear it. I took the charity's donor list because nobody trusted the mailing costs. It held 11,400 records and I found 2,100 duplicates, about 18 percent. Removing them cut the mailing to 9,300 and saved about 1,302 dollars in postage at 62 cents a letter. The finance trustee had told me the list was clean, so the conversation afterwards was the harder half of the work. What I want next is that conversation as the job rather than as the side effect of it, and the reason I am in this room is the Transaction and Investor Support work, where a number is the deliverable and somebody on the other side of the table is paid to argue with it."

Recompute: 2,100 divided by 11,400 is 0.184, so about 18 percent. 11,400 minus 2,100 is 9,300. 2,100 times 0.62 is 1,302.

That is 208 words, which runs about ninety-five seconds. It leaves room inside the three-minute ceiling for a second piece of evidence if the interviewer wants one, and it ends on the work rather than on a feeling. The closing clause names a platform from a real posting, which is the cheapest way to show you read past the careers home page.

What Roland Berger never publishes about itself

The list of absences is long, and a page that pretends otherwise is guessing. Having read the corporate pages, the careers pages, a live posting and both language versions of the FAQ, here is what no Roland Berger page in our reading contains.

On the firm: no revenue, no office count, no country count, no headcount by office or by rung, and no number of partners, even though partners own the whole of it. On the process: no vendor, duration, section list or pass mark for the online analytics test, no number of case interviews for permanent entry, no interview durations, and no selection rate at any stage. On the fit interview specifically: no question, no criterion, no threshold and no weight. On pay: "an attractive starting salary and bonus", and nothing more.

One contradiction is worth holding in view. The hints page sets a fit presentation for Junior Consultant candidates. The live London posting for Junior Consultant 2027 names five stages and not one of them contains the word fit. Both are published, both are current, and neither mentions the other.

A single outside account gives the only duration anyone states. A trade title interviewed a consultant who described his final round in the Chicago office in December 2016: "The final round was 3 hours long. It started with a 45 minute behavioural fit interview followed by a 45 minute business knowledge interview." Hold it loosely. One candidate, one office, one year, nine years before this page. It does not contradict the firm, because the firm publishes nothing to contradict. The spelling is the source's own.

Where our scoring fits a Roland Berger fit answer

The weights below are ours, applied by our own grader and read from the code that scores. No firm publishes a marking scheme for a spoken answer, Roland Berger included, and what it publishes instead is a stopwatch.