WHAT ARE CASE COMPETITIONS?

Case competitions allow students to learn and apply their consulting skills with real-life cases.

What are case competitions?

A case competition is an event where teams of 3-4 solve a case study on real-life companies in a limited time frame to present innovative strategic recommendations to a panel of judges. 

Cases can come in all shapes and sizes, but often reflect a topical concern - ranging from developing a customer acquisition strategy, performing due diligence on a market entry prospect, to growing business’ bottom line. Whilst competition formats differ worldwide, students must emulate industry practices and apply their technical knowledge.

Winning strategies require attention to detail, creativity and robust business acumen to target the most prominent issues facing the organisation. Teams must be able to work together to present a cohesive recommendation to a panel of judges, often representatives from the case company.

Benefits of embracing a casing culture 

Embracing the case culture is a pathway to fine tune key problem-solving capabilities, gain experience working in teams, and build confidence in persuasive presentation skills. It is a combination of the agile working style required to compete under pressure, along with the technical skills required to produce a high quality recommendation that enables students to develop some of the most sought after professional skills in industry.

Case competitions also provide students an opportunity to network with other talented students and industry professionals from around the world through social gatherings and formal roundtable discussions. At UCC, we believe these competitions can create university-defining experiences for students.

CBS Global 2020 - Raymond Cheng, Jess Williams, Pennie Li, Jack Zhou (not pictured)

JMUCC 2020 - Jack Karnaghan, Nina Yang, Alon Moss, Tina Nguyen

How can I get involved?

While there are many ways students can get involved in case competitions, we have 2 recommendations at UCC.

  1. We encourage interested students to participate in case competitions held domestically to gain empirical experiences and skills. UCC organises an average of 2 flagship case competitions per term to undergraduate students across Australia and New Zealand. The final rounds of our competitions are publicly streamed - viewership is highly recommended to watch some of the best and brightest students across the Trans-Tasman compete against each other. Read more about the competitions we run here.

  2. Additionally, we recommend students attend our General Member workshops held during the term to learn core technical skills by our sponsors and senior squad members to develop a well-rounded consulting toolkit not only for competition performance, but career development. Read more about our General Member workshops here.

As a next step, students are encouraged to apply for the UCC International Case Competition (ICC) Squad, an intensive program where students are trained with the opportunity to represent UNSW at International Case Competitions. Read more about the squad here.