Risk Consulting Summer

"Risk Consulting Summer" is shorthand for a summer internship in the risk consulting practice of a professional services or consulting firm, usually lasting a few weeks over the university summer holidays. Risk consultants help client organisations — banks, insurers, government bodies, retailers, utilities, charities — work out what could go wrong in how they are run, and whether the controls they have in place actually work. As an intern you sit on real client teams doing supporting analysis, testing and documentation, and the placement doubles as an extended assessment for a graduate job offer.

Starting salary: £28k–£38k
Live graduate jobs: 7 open now
Main way in: The standard route
They usually ask for: Degree subject usually does not matter much

Approximate graduate salary

Summer internships in this area are paid, typically at a pro-rata rate roughly in line with the firm's graduate starting salary. Graduate salaries in risk consulting are commonly somewhere around £28,000–38,000 to start, with London noticeably higher than regional offices and large firms generally paying more than smaller ones — treat these as rough approximations that vary widely by employer, location and specialism.

What you'd actually do

Testing controls: picking a sample of transactions, approvals or system records and checking whether the client followed its own process — then writing up what you found, including the exceptions</parameter>
Working through client data in Excel — reconciling figures, building simple summaries, spotting records that look wrong or incomplete — and increasingly using tools like Power BI or Alteryx where the team has them
Sitting in on (and taking notes at) client walkthrough meetings, where someone from the client explains how a process such as payments, procurement or onboarding actually works in practice
Drafting sections of deliverables: slides, control descriptions, findings tables, risk registers, or parts of a report that a senior will then heavily edit

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Desk research on a client's sector, regulator or a specific risk area — for example what a new piece of regulation requires, or how peers handle a particular control
Attending internal training sessions on the firm's methodology, plus networking events, a group case-study project and a presentation to senior staff at the end of the internship
Timesheets, chasing clients for outstanding information, and formatting documents — unglamorous but a real part of the week

How graduates get in

The standard route: apply directly to a firm's summer internship scheme in the autumn of your penultimate year. Applications often open September to November and many firms close early once places fill, so applying early genuinely matters.
Spring weeks or insight programmes in first year (or second year of a four-year course). These are shorter, mostly structured insight rather than client work, and often fast-track you to an internship offer — a common route into the larger firms.
Industrial placement years (usually 12 months) rather than a summer. Common for students on sandwich degrees, and a strong alternative if you miss summer deadlines.
Direct entry to a graduate scheme in your final year without having interned — entirely normal, though at some firms a large share of graduate places go to returning interns.

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Off-cycle or ad hoc internships at smaller consultancies and in-house risk teams. These are advertised less formally, sometimes through university careers services or speculative applications, and are less structured than the big-firm schemes.

What employers ask for

Degree subject usually does not matter much. Accounting, finance, economics, maths and business are common, but firms recruit from law, sciences, engineering and humanities — risk work draws on judgement and process thinking more than any one syllabus. Technology risk and cyber risk teams do often prefer computing, engineering or data-related degrees.
Typically a 2:1 predicted or achieved, though a number of firms have moved to 2:2 minimums or dropped degree-grade filters. UCAS point or A-level requirements have been relaxed at many firms but not all — check each advert rather than assuming.
Penultimate-year status for most summer schemes. Some firms accept finalists or first-years into separate programmes, and definitions get blurry for four-year and integrated master's courses, so read the eligibility notes carefully.
No professional qualification needed to intern. On the graduate scheme that follows you may study towards ACA or ACCA (accountancy), CISA (information systems audit), CIA (internal audit), or a risk-specific qualification such as those from the Institute of Risk Management — which one depends entirely on the team you join.

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Evidence of commercial curiosity: being able to talk about why a business might fail, what a regulator does, or something you have read about a company recently. This is tested in interviews more than technical knowledge.
Right to work in the UK matters for some firms; sponsorship policies for internships vary a lot and are often more restrictive than for graduate roles.

Skills that matter

Excel competence beyond the basics

Most of your actual output involves filtering, lookups, pivot tables and reconciling two sets of numbers that should match but don't.

Precise, structured writing

A finding has to say exactly what was tested, what was wrong and why it matters, in language a client executive will accept — vague wording gets sent straight back.

Asking awkward questions politely

Much of risk work is getting a busy client to admit that the documented process isn't the one they actually follow, without putting them on the defensive.

Attention to detail and self-checking

An intern's error in a sample test or a number in a report can undermine the whole deliverable, so people who check their own work before handing it over stand out quickly.

Process thinking

You need to be able to follow a transaction from start to finish and see where the gap is — who approves what, what stops someone doing it twice, what happens if the system is down.

Managing your own time across several bits of work

Interns are usually borrowed by two or three managers at once and no one is tracking your total workload for you, so flagging capacity early is part of the job.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Complete the internship and, if it goes well, receive a graduate scheme offer for after you finish your degree. Many firms make returner offers; conversion rates vary and are not guaranteed.
Join as a graduate analyst or associate, usually starting professional exams and rotating or specialising into a particular risk area — internal audit, technology and cyber risk, regulatory and compliance risk, financial risk, or enterprise risk.
Promotion to a senior analyst or senior associate level after a few years, where you run fieldwork on a client engagement yourself and supervise juniors. Timing varies by firm and is partly tied to exam progress.
Manager level, where you own client relationships, scope and price work, and are responsible for the quality of deliverables. From here the ladder continues through senior manager to director and partner, but timelines vary widely and many people don't take this route.
Moving in-house is extremely common and often happens at the two-to-five-year mark: into a company's internal audit, risk, compliance or operational-resilience function, or into regulators such as the financial or health regulators. Some move sideways into data analytics, cyber security or general management consulting.

What people get wrong

“Risk consulting is about predicting financial markets or building statistical risk models.”

That is quantitative risk, a narrower specialism usually sitting in banks and insurers. Most graduate risk consulting work is about processes, controls and governance — how an organisation is run — and can involve very little maths beyond careful arithmetic.

“You need an accounting or finance degree.”

Firms recruit broadly, and some of the fastest-growing areas — technology risk, cyber, data governance, operational resilience, climate and sustainability risk — actively want people from technical or non-business backgrounds.

“An internship is mostly shadowing, coffee runs and training sessions.”

At most firms you are charged to client work from early on and produce output that goes into real deliverables. The flip side is that it is also an extended interview — behaviour, reliability and attitude are being assessed every day, not just in the final presentation.

“It is all office-based consulting glamour.”

A lot of the work is detailed documentation, sampling and chasing clients for evidence they are slow to provide. Travel to client sites varies enormously — some teams are on site weekly, others work almost entirely remotely or from the firm's office.

Where this varies

"Risk consulting" covers very different work depending on where you land. At large multi-service professional services firms it usually means internal audit, controls assurance and regulatory work for big clients, with a structured programme and professional exams. At specialist consultancies it may be narrower — cyber risk, financial crime, or operational resilience — with less formal training but earlier client exposure. Within financial services the work is dominated by regulation and the demands of the financial regulators; in the public sector and charities it leans towards governance, value for money and assurance over programmes. Internship structure also differs: some firms run a single placed-on-a-team model, others rotate you or build the programme around a group project. Office location matters more than people expect — regional offices often serve mid-sized local clients and give interns broader exposure, while London teams tend to be more specialised.

See all 7 live Risk Consulting Summer jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.