Move over “The Apprentice.” Spotlight on Protiviti, and their total immersion Internship training program, The Intern Challenge.

Move over, “The Apprentice”. Protiviti has its own reality show.

The 2010 intern class at Protiviti, a global business consulting and internal audit firm, didn’t spend their orientation listening to presentations and taking notes. Instead, through the firm’s new Intern Challenge program, students kicked off their training week with business simulations designed to enable them to sample the work environment and industry they’re preparing to enter.

“The simulation approach gives our interns a taste of real-life situations, which are not always predictable,” says Elaine Poucher, national recruiting lead. She adds, “The program creates an edge and sense of accountability, and establishes the expectation that interns need to think on their feet in the workplace.”

During the one week Intern Challenge, 60 students meet in teams with pretend clients, analyze problems and create solutions, all under the watchful eye of a facilitator who steps in, as needed, to provide guidance.

Victoria Hupf, a senior at University of Washington, and an intern at Protiviti’s Seattle office, was in Orlando for this year’s training. She described the experience as, “pretty daunting since most people never had any consulting training.”

In Hupf’s case, she and a team of three others were presented with a “client” who wanted to be compliant with payment card industry standards. They met with several of the client’s process owners like an IT manager and finance manager, and completed process maps and performed test controls.

In the end, the team created a presentation to their managing director, of the issues they found at the client, the solution suggestions they made, and the documents they had been working on. This process enabled the interns to go through much of the varying steps you might typically have in a consulting project including critical soft skills like client communication and sales presentations.

Intern Victoria Hupf says she likes that it was so hands on. “You don’t get as much from just watching a PowerPoint. By actually simulating it, you get to know what you are really doing. You also don’t feel as untested when you start doing your first client assignment, because you feel like you’ve had some real experience. I know that I’ve used a lot of what I’ve learned.”

According to Protiviti’s Elaine Poucher, that retention is part of the reason they designed the program the way they did. Poucher says, “the training has proven to increase retention, up to 90 percent of the information they receive during a simulation.”

The intern training also involves morning presentations by Protiviti executives and evening challenges which Hupf describes as a lot of fun. The evening team building challenges included things like working with your team to recreate packaged salsas or sauces without knowing the recipe, and then creating advertising including commercials for their product. They even had a networking event.

Poucher says the Intern Challenge has proved to be such a success, Protiviti recently began using the technique as part of their new hire orientation, with great results.