Driving into the Q Center near St Charles, Illinois, feels like entering a small liberal-arts college in remote countryside.

Although it is only about 40 miles west of downtown Chicago, the surrounding area is dotted with red barns and village stores. The centre itself - home to Accenture's "Strategy College" - is set in lush and peaceful grounds. Students clutching laptop bags sit on the grass, enjoying a sunny spring day.

If the atmosphere outside is soporific, inside it is focused and driven. In a meeting room, Matthew Wudy, an Accenture employee, is locked in a meeting with Chuck Hempfling, the regional vice-president for LCC, a US telecommunications company.

LCC is looking to integrate the disparate systems used by outsourced workers and has brought in the management consultants to help. Mr Hempfling seems convinced by the plan Mr Wudy presents him, but says he wants more details. Mr Wudy assures him he will come back with firm figures that can be put to LCC's steering committee.

After the two shake hands, Mr Hempfling indicates that Mr Wudy should stay, and ushers forward three other Accenture employees to give group feedback.

Although the meeting has been a training session, Mr Hempfling - a 32-year veteran of the telecoms industry - explains later that the situation is highly realistic.

"I basically play myself," he says. "I react to them as I would in a meeting in the real business world. We're not following a script."

Accenture's use of real-life clients to role-play has drawn widespread praise. Unlike most training programmes, which depend on actors or training professionals, the management consultancy insists that to make such exercises as realistic as possible demands that the "customer" has business experience. The company flies in clients, former clients and other industry experts from all over the world to St Charles to participate in sessions. The result is that its training is much more respected in the field, says Mr Hempfling.

This is part of the approach that has given the facility its reputation as a role-model for training programmes. For the past 38 years it has served as Accenture's "corporate university", drawing employees from all over the world to be trained in the consultancy's methodology and practices.

Don Vanthournout, Accenture's chief learning officer, says the company's vision of a unified way of doing business across the world makes a single institution critical. St Charles throws together employees from different countries and gives them a chance to meet, learn and work with each other. "We're a global company, not an international company," he says. "We teach the Accenture way to do things. The result is that if you take analysts from anywhere in the world, they can come together and act co-operatively."

Although Accenture also operates training facilities in Kuala Lumpur and Milton Keynes, St Charles is by far the most important, offering about 160,000 days of staff training a year - more than 75 per cent of all the training the company lays on. All employees pass through the strategy college: at every stage of promotion - about every two or four years - they attend a week-long course. Typically 500-1,000 students and up to 75 instructors are at St Charles at any one time.

That gives the institution a tradition enjoyed by few training locations. "St Charles is special because of the history," says Mr Vanthournout. "We have a lot of people who've been with Accenture for 25 or 30 years and we all came to school here."

Just as Accenture insists on bringing in people with real business experience to act in simulations, the faculty at St Charles are all Accenture consultants who take a break from their work to teach. Most fly in to teach one week-long course.

Deirdre Mondel, a senior manager based in Sydney who has been working for Accenture for 14 years, enjoys being on the faculty so much that she has taken an extended break from her office to spend a few months at St Charles.

"I learn more from teaching others than when I'm being taught," she says. "And it gives me a real sense of accomplishment - it's a wrench to day goodbye to the students at the end."

Mr Vanthournout stresses that attending is not a holiday from work. "It's not just a week of vacation, or just sitting through lectures. It's very hands-on."

Classes run from 8am to 6pm, most of which is spent working in small groups within a classroom. Students are taught Accenture's proprietary methods, then split into teams to come up with "deliverables" that demonstrate the application of what they have been taught. They then get feedback from their fellow students as well as their instructors.

Flying in employees and clients from all over the world does not come cheap: Accenture budgets about $800m a year for training, which Mr Vanthournout says makes St Charles central to the company's business model. "We don't have a world headquarters. This is the heart and home of the Accenture culture."