Strategy& Case Interview 2026: Ten Minutes With a Slide Pack

Where the firm says anything at all

Start with what is not there. The global Join us page describes the work, the people and what the firm says it hires for. It writes that Strategy& hires for mindset as much as credentials. It names no step, no interview, no assessment and no title.

So there is no such thing as the Strategy& process. There are regional ones, and they are published in different places with different detail. The UK pages carry the most. The Middle East page carries the case instructions. Everything else is quiet.

That has a practical consequence before you read another word. If a source tells you the Strategy& process is X without naming a country, it cannot have got that from Strategy&.

The detail lives on two UK pages that say the same thing twice: the careers FAQ and the graduates and interns page. Both state the steps in order. You submit a CV and a personal statement online. You complete an online assessment. If you pass that and the screen, you are invited to a first round of two back-to-back interviews, virtual or at the London office. Pass the first round and a second round follows, either later the same day as part of a full day in person, or on a separate assessment day. Some experienced hires get a third round.

The structured case interview, and the ten minutes that decide it

This is the format worth reorganizing your practice around, and the firm's wording is exact. You are given a case study with a slide pack, which reflects a real client project the firm has worked on. You get about ten minutes to look over the information before being asked to develop recommended solutions.

Read what that changes. The data arrives before the conversation begins. Nobody feeds you a figure at the moment you need it. If a number is in the pack and you did not find it in your ten minutes, it is not coming back.

Ten minutes is short for a pack and long for a panic. A workable split: two minutes on the question being asked and the pack's contents page, five minutes on the two or three exhibits that carry the answer, three minutes writing the recommendation you will open with. Write the recommendation before you feel ready. You can revise a written line in thirty seconds. You cannot invent one while someone waits.

The skill under this is exhibit reading. Our chart drill times exactly that, and the same habit is broken down on reading case exhibits. Practice with a clock, because the ten minutes is the whole exercise.

The unstructured case, and the interview it hides inside

The other 45 minutes is two exercises wearing one name. The firm says you will first be asked a number of questions to learn more about who you are: your background, your personal experiences, any previous professional work, and your motivations for joining Strategy&. Then you are given an unstructured consulting case to work through with your interviewer.

It is tempting to prepare the second half and improvise the first. That is backwards for a simple reason. The fit questions are the ones you can answer perfectly with preparation, and they are asked while the interviewer is forming the impression they will carry into the case.

Four of them are named on the page, so prepare four answers and not a personality. Your background. A personal experience. Prior work experience, if you have any. Why Strategy& rather than somewhere else. That last one has a specific answer available at this firm, which the next section explains.

Then the case itself, and the firm is unusually direct about what it is for. Its case studies, it writes, are designed to show how you think when structuring an approach to a client's problem, rather than coming up with the right answer. The sentence puts its emphasis on the word structuring.

One thing worth knowing about what Strategy& juniors actually do, because it makes the motivation question answerable. In the UK the team sits inside PwC's Deals line of service. Two consultants whose stories the firm publishes both describe commercial due diligence work as interns: one on a private equity purchase of a medical aesthetics business, one on a cosmetic pharmaceutical deal. If commercial due diligence is the reason you are applying, say so, and say it in the first ten minutes.

Two official processes, and the case interview moves between them

Here is the part that should change how you read any guide, including this one. PwC's own graduate Strategy page describes the UK process too. It describes a different one.

Neither page mentions the other. The video interview and the assessment centre appear on one and are absent from the other. On the PwC version, the cases arrive at the final stage rather than the first round. The PwC page adds one detail Strategy& does not: you state a preference between Strategy& and Enterprise Strategy before the assessment centre, and both roles are London based.

We are not going to resolve this for you, because neither page gives us the grounds. What we can say is what it means in practice. Prepare for the superset. Assume a recorded video interview may exist, assume an assessment centre may exist, and assume cases could sit at either end of the funnel. Then read your invitation email, which is the only document written about your process rather than about the process.

It also means one more thing about timing. UK Associate applications typically open from September, and you may only hold one PwC UK application in any six month window. Choosing which role to apply for is therefore a decision with a two application per year budget attached.

Eleven case interview instructions, and the four that cost marks

The Middle East business case prep page publishes eleven instructions for the case. Most are ordinary advice. Four of them describe a behavior specific enough to rehearse, and all four are easy to drop once the clock is running.

1. Summarize the case back in your own words after the interviewer finishes the setup, to confirm you have the problem right. Thirty seconds, every time, before anything else.
2. Say your structure out loud and let the interviewer comment on it. The page is explicit that the simpler the framework the better, and that once the interviewer endorses it you stick to it. This is an invitation to be interrupted early rather than corrected late.
3. Pause periodically so the interviewer can course correct. The page treats interviewer advice as intended to be helpful, and says to take it. Silence is built into the exercise on purpose; the page also tells you to take a minute to think and not fear the quiet.
4. Take a stand and recommend at the end, and the page says you may feel uncomfortable committing with little data and little time. It names the discomfort and then tells you to commit anyway.

The same page describes the format: a total of three to four 45 minute interviews, in a sentence that then refers to both sessions containing a real world case discussion. The word "both" has nothing to point at in a set of three or four. So the count of interviews carrying a case is not settled by the source, and anyone stating it confidently is not reading this page.

One more line from it deserves quoting because it contradicts how most people practice: there is no single right way of answering a case. It also tells you to get practice cases from your school's consulting club and to work with a partner rather than reading the cases first.

A bank, a hospital group, and the arithmetic worth running

PwC publishes two complete sample cases with figures, on its US entry level case prep page. That page covers Advisory broadly and never names Strategy&, so treat it as PwC's words on its own case interviews rather than as the Strategy& format. The cases are still the most detailed thing PwC gives away.

The first is a global bank with $300 billion in assets planning a two year shift to digital banking, with the Chief Risk Officer asking for a point of view and a risk road map. Two figures carry it: about 80% of US banking customers visit a branch at least once a year, and 40% never use their bank's mobile app. Those two numbers are the case. A bank whose customers keep walking in has a channel problem before it has a technology problem, and the risk map follows from that.

The second is a $20 billion healthcare provider weighing the purchase of a telemedicine company. The acquisition would lift total revenue by about 2.5% and lift telemedicine revenue by 35% on a current $1 billion.

Run it. 2.5% of $20 billion is $500 million. 35% of $1 billion is $350 million. So roughly 70% of the revenue gain is telemedicine, and the rest is everything else the target does. That single line reframes the case: this is a bet on one service line, priced as a company. Then read the constraints against it. Three past acquisitions were costly to integrate, the target has never done a deal, its key staff object to the sale, and the buyer is already under scrutiny over patient data. The deal logic is narrow and the integration risk is broad.

One caution on the source, because we will not quietly tidy it. The page writes 2.5% on "$20 billion earnings" while the rest of the sentence talks about revenue. The figures are PwC's. The reading above is ours.

PwC also states what it listens for, in five words: structured thinking, comfort with ambiguity, communication, business intuition with basic numeracy, and curiosity with coachability. It says the case typically runs 30 to 45 minutes, that no advanced math is required, that notes are encouraged, and that generative AI is not permitted at any point in the assessment and interview process.

What our grader rewards on a structuring answer

Strategy& says it wants to see how you structure an approach rather than whether you reach the right answer. That is a claim about weighting, so here is ours, made explicit. The dimensions below are what our grader measures on a structuring answer, with the weight each carries out of a hundred.

Where Strategy& candidates lose it

1. Preparing one case format. The UK first round has two, and they reward opposite habits. Asking good questions wins the unstructured case and does nothing for a slide pack you have already been handed.
2. Spending the ten minutes reading evenly. A pack read front to back at constant speed produces a candidate who has seen everything and found nothing. Two or three exhibits carry the answer.
3. Waiting to be ready before writing the recommendation. You will not feel ready at minute eight. Write the line anyway and revise it aloud.
4. Improvising the fit half of the unstructured interview. Four question types are named on the page. Preparing them costs an evening.
5. Believing one published process. Two PwC pages describe the UK route differently. Preparing for only one of them is a coin flip you did not need to take.
6. Quoting an interview count. The Middle East page contradicts itself in a single sentence. Nobody outside the firm knows how many of your interviews carry a case.
7. Saving the recommendation for the end and then hedging it. The firm names the discomfort and tells you to commit. Answer first is 35 of 100 on our synthesis rubric.
8. Burning your PwC UK application on the wrong role. One application per six month window is a published rule, and it makes role choice part of the preparation.

The first four are specific to how this firm runs its cases. The last four are the general failure modes showing up in a Strategy& shaped way, which is why a diagnosis beats firm specific reading once you know the rules.

A preparation order built for this process

No fixed calendar. The right length depends on which dimension you lose, and that is knowable in twenty minutes rather than guessable in advance.

1. Diagnose first. One short drill of each type: math, structuring, brainstorming, exhibits, synthesis, sizing. The dimension each rubric names as the first correction is your plan. Most people are surprised by which one it is.
2. Work the losing dimension until it moves. The structuring drill and the math drill are open without an account.
3. Build a ten minute pack routine. Take any deck with exhibits, set a timer, and finish with a written recommendation. Do it until ten minutes stops feeling short. This is the single most Strategy& specific thing you can practice.
4. Write four fit answers. Background, a personal experience, prior work, and why this firm. Say them aloud until they are ninety seconds each.
5. Work both PwC sample cases. Structure them, run the arithmetic yourself, then compare with the sample responses at your level. The undergraduate and MBA answers differ in a way that tells you what a Senior Associate answer is expected to add.
6. Rehearse being interrupted. Have someone redirect you mid structure. The published instructions ask you to take the interviewer's steer and keep going, and doing that gracefully is a skill you can drill.
7. Say a ninety second close ten times. Recommendation, two supports, one risk, one next step. The general case craft that carries across firms is set out on our PwC case interview guide.

What Strategy& does not publish

What is in the online assessment. No vendor, no sections, no length, no question count. PwC UK says only that it measures cognitive skills, behaviors, natural preferences and reasoning abilities. Any named tool you read about is unsourced.

Any pass threshold. None for the assessment, none for the cases. No figure exists.

What the second round contains. The UK pages say a second round of interviews and stop. Format and count are in your invitation.

What the slide pack looks like. Page count, exhibit types, whether a formal presentation is expected, whether you may write during the ten minutes. None of it is published.

Whether the structured case exists outside the UK. Only the UK pages describe it. The Middle East page mentions no written material at all, and no other region publishes a process.

Any salary. No page we read states pay, in any region.

Every gap above is a page we opened with the question in hand. The answer each time was that the firm had not written it down.

There is no separate fit round to prepare for here, which is itself the finding: the background questions open the case and share its clock.

What changed on the Strategy& page

We correct in public and date the correction, so a returning reader can see what moved.

29 September 2026. The version published on 24 September carried no source register and had never been read against the firm's own pages. Three claims in it are gone.

It said Strategy&'s screening steps could not be verified, and refused to describe them on that basis. The UK careers FAQ and the graduates and interns page both list those steps in order, in English, and had done so well before that sentence was written. Calling that caution did not make it caution. It was a failure to read the source, and it is the reason the page was rebuilt from scratch.

It named market sizing as the highest yield drill for this seat. Nothing Strategy& publishes ranks one skill above another, and the firm's own wording points at structuring instead.

It asserted that Strategy& cases end where implementation begins. No page the firm publishes describes where its cases end, so the sentence had no origin outside our own heads.