how to prepare for case interview for a non-finance/business background

Question

Hi

I am practicing my case interviews for my upcoming Oliver Wyman interview. During my practice the thing that makes me struggle the most is when they give me a piece of data and ask me questions e.g. return of investment, market share, will the company break even? As a science background graduate I have no knowledge of this. Could anyone suggest any good and efficient (possible free) all business knowledges resources that I need to know for a case interview?

Thank you

Answer 1

Hello Jirapat,

based on disciplens you've mentioned, there are 3 key areas in which you need to obtain fundamentals:

Basic Corporate Finance (valuation techniques)
Basic Financial Accounting (understand terminology like: Accounts Payable/Receivable, and be able to "read" Balance, P&L, CF)
Basic Managerial Accounting (especially i recomend to focus on cost structures and behaviours)

There are two ways to do so:

Available consulting preparations services which are FREE, and contain all 3 components and application frameworks in a single course (reasonable solution if you're quite short on time, pragmatic and quite practical; - however lacks some "academic" level knowledge).
Study your way more "academicaly" (Libby/Libby/Hodge for deep understanding of FA, as example), use services like OpenTuition and focus on Fundamentals of CFA/CIMA/ACCA.

Answer 2

Hello!

I wuold suggest you to practice with GMAT.

GMAT unfortunately only gets better with practicing. Good news is that there are many ways of doing so!

There are free exams in the internet that you can use for practice (the one of LBS MBA page, Verits prep, as well as some free trials for courses such as the one of The Economist (https://gmat.economist.com/)

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara