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Prepare for Consulting Interviews with these Consulting Case Studies
Updated: Jun 29, 2020
Are you preparing for consulting interviews? If yes, then this post will help you with a comprehensive list of consulting case prep material that you can use to crack the consulting case interviews. This list has been curated after several discussions with IIM graduates who prepared for McKinsey, BCG and Bain case interviews.
Whether you're someone who has prepared for consulting cases before or you're someone who has never had an exposure to consulting case preparation, this post is definitely going to help you. The list of resources for case preparation has been shared beginning with the most basic ones extending to the most advanced ones.
Resources: Case Interview Prep
Broadly, there are two kinds of resources - videos and case prep books. If you're a beginner, I would recommend that you start with watching videos first. This is because it will help you understand how cases are structured and how their solutions are communicated.
Video Resources
As mentioned earlier, these resources have been listed in the order of your level of existing case preparation beginning from the most basic ones:
How to Solve Guesstimates by Aaditya Agarwal: Aaditya is one of my batch mates at IIM Ahmedabad and he is also known as the 'Consulting God of IIM-A' (he wouldn't want me to write this but he deserves the tag). I watched Aaditya's guesstimate videos when I was preparing for McKinsey Knowledge Centre's interview during my undergrad. Later at IIM-A, we turned out to be sideys in the same section :) If you're preparing for consulting interviews from scratch, guesstimates is the first thing you should practice. So, I really recommend his channel for learning how to solve guesstimates.
Victor Cheng Case Interview Secrets: This is the second most important resource that almost every student, who prepares for consulting interviews, invests in. I call it an investment because his workshop consists of 12 YouTube videos worth a total stream time of 4.5 hours. But, the time you'd invest would be guaranteed to result in a lot of learning about consulting case prep.
Consulting & Strategy Club, IIM Lucknow: The next recommendation will take you through the process of solving case interviews with a series of mock case interviews performed by IIM Lucknow students. Now, the reason it comes after the previous suggestions is that it shows how the communication of the case solution takes place between an interviewer and an interviewee. You would need this resource only when you've gone through the basics i.e. guesstimates and case structuring.
Case Prep Books
The other type of resources are case prep books and repositories of McKinsey, BCG and Bain interview questions asked at IIMs, Ivy League Schools, IITs and other academic institutes. The most prominent ones that we use include:
Case Interview Cracked (CIC)
Case in Point (Marc Cosentino)
IIM-A Case Book
IIM-B Case Book
Harvard Business School Case Book
ISB Consulting Case Book
IIT Kanpur Case Book
Wharton Consulting Case Book
Tuck Consulting Case Book
Ross Consulting Case Book
Kellogg Consulting Case Book
To make it easy for you to access these resources, I've uploaded the PDF copies of the above mentioned (and more) in a downloadable version on my drive. You can access the case prep books here.
Case Study Practice
It is always suggested that you prepare for consulting interview cases in a group (of 3-4) in which one members acts as the interviewee, one member acts as the interviewer and the rest are observers (taking notes of what all can be improved). You can keep changing roles in each practice interview.
How many case studies?
At IIM-A, serious consulting aspirants generally solve at least 40-50 cases to get a knack of the basic structure, clarifying questions and the communication bit. If you're at an undergrad level, you may solve about 30 cases (in a duo or a group) and then read the rest of them by your own.
Hope this gives you enough consulting case interview prep material to start with your case preparation. One post that you must read in addition to this is How to get consulting jobs? Stay tuned for more posts on preparation material for internships and jobs.
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