At Protiviti, we take training very seriously.  But you don’t have to take it from me.  Take it from Eujin, a new hire who bleeds Illini orange and blue, and who recently attended The Consultant Challenge held this fall (see the group picture above).

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Interviewing, process mapping, control testing, documenting….

As consultants, these become your basic tools.  The Consultant Challenge is your training ground.  From 8am to 6pm, you’re broken down, then rebuilt into a better version of yourself.

Take 40 recent college graduates, fly them out to San Francisco, place them in the same hotel, and give them a per diem. This has the makings of a new reality show.

The Consultant Challenge is a rite of passage, a trial by fire, a spirit walk.  It is what, essentially, life boils down to:  a huge tightrope style balancing act. It wouldn’t be called a Consultant Challenge if it didn’t actually have the challenges, such as:

  • Conducting an interview with a purposefully difficult facilitator.
  • Rushing to finish testing before a deadline.
  • Averaging 6 hours of sleep a night.
  • Subsequently drinking your water weight in coffee and Diet Coke.
  • Dropping the 3 hole puncher, exploding all the pieces of paper inside.
  • Wearing business casual to every single outing because you didn’t bring any casual clothes.

And you persevere through it all, not because you have to, but because you want to.

Before you know it, you’ve grown up with the people around you.  On the last day of training, these other people that were once strangers have become old friends, and as you go through the tearful goodbyes, handshakes, and hugs, you start realizing the core of this business…
At the client, you may be interviewing process owners, searching for control gaps, or documenting results, but you, the company, the industry lives and dies with people and the relationships created.  I will not ever forget the group I started with, nor would I ever want to.

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