I made it past the first round of ey parthenon, now the next round consist of meeting of the valuation ,due diligence team, divestment , management consulting ( strategy) and transactions team. How would one go about preparing for round 2

Hi!

Congrats on making it past the first round, that’s already a strong sign. For round two, the key is to recognize that you’ll be speaking with different teams who each have slightly different lenses, so your prep should balance technical fluency with commercial thinking. On the valuation and due diligence side, be ready to talk through how you’d approach analyzing a company’s financials, assessing key value drivers, and spotting risks in deals. 

For divestments and transactions, you should show awareness of how businesses prepare assets for sale and how strategic buyers think about synergies and deal rationale.

For the strategy side, your focus should shift more toward market analysis, competitive dynamics, and how you’d structure recommendations for clients. Practicing mini-cases, staying sharp on finance fundamentals, and having a few thoughtful commercial insights on current market trends will help you stand out. 

Above all, make sure you can explain your thinking clearly and tailor your responses to the team’s focus area while keeping a consistent narrative about your skills and motivations.

Hi,

well done on getting to round two. At this stage, I would think less in terms of memorizing frameworks and more in terms of showing flexibility. Each team has its own focus, but they all want to see how you think under pressure and how you structure unfamiliar problems.

What helped me in similar settings was to prepare a few angles I could always fall back on. For the valuation and due diligence conversations, that might mean being comfortable discussing how you would break down a company’s performance and identify what really drives value. For the transaction and divestment side, it can be useful to show that you understand the bigger picture of why companies buy or sell parts of their business. And on the strategy side, you will want to show that you can take a step back, think about markets, and frame clear recommendations.

If you practice switching between these perspectives and keep your answers simple and structured, you will come across as someone who can adapt quickly. I would also prepare one or two examples from your own experience that you can use in different contexts. That way you do not sound rehearsed, but you always have something concrete to fall back on.

Best of luck, 

Simon.