My first job in insurance was pricing a homeowners product. I joined a team of smart analysts but I was the only actuary. In fact, my boss had attempted to become an actuary but had struggled to pass exams and bailed out after only passing five.
The rest of the team were super smart and all had good degrees and strong backgrounds. But they hadn’t elected to take the actuarial qualification.
My manager had a bias against the qualification. He didn’t see it as necessary, and this viewpoint became ingrained in me. An actuarial qualification is not the be all and end all. Fortunately I persevered and completed the qualification.
As I progressed in my career I worked for other leaders – none of whom had an actuarial qualification either. Two had got MBA’s and another had gone to business school. I learnt a tremendous amount from them about non-actuarial things.
How to put together presentations, how best to communicate, how to lead meetings, how to run projects, and how the “business” works.
Some of these things I would have got exposure to from an actuary but having a different perspective broadened my thinking and made me more rounded. I was able to get the exposure to other actuaries (through working with my peers and managing people) that enabled me to sharpen my skillset, without directly working for an actuary.
Rightly or wrongly, actuaries are seen primarily as technical experts – the numbers people who are very good at analyzing data. If you can elevate yourself as someone who offers more than just a technical lens, your value will skyrocket:
Think about things from the perspective of others
It’s easy to assume that a business needs to be run based on what the numbers say.
But businesses are not run on a spreadsheet. Organizations (particularly large ones) are complex systems full of contradictions, competing priorities and people who have opinions contrary to what the data says!
For example - It’s very easy for an actuary to say that we need to increase prices because a rate indication says so. In practice, it can be hard to increase prices.
Depending on the distribution channel, there’s potentially more than one person between you and the final customer (retail broker, wholesale broker, underwriter, etc.) Spend time really understanding why it’s hard to increase prices.
This will come from speaking with people. Ask if you can shadow an underwriter and understand their workflow. What happens if the price is too expensive?
Do they get complaints from their brokers? Why is this? Does the broker complain because it means they need to do more work? Or because it means they need to have a difficult conversation with their customer? Or does this change put you out of step vs the rest of the market? Is your analysis based on flawed assumptions?
Ideally you want to get as close to the root of the problem as possible. This softer feedback is so important. Combining the data and analysis with qualitative feedback gives you all the information you need to drive forward with the right decision.
This type of thinking can apply to any actuarial task.
Do not be afraid to taking a non-standard role
If you go back a generation or two, employees would spend their whole career with one company. Nowadays, it’s customary to spend a few years with lots of companies, moving to get new experiences, learn different products and experiencing new cultures.
In the future, it’s going to be more important than ever to be adaptable and open to change. We don’t know how AI is going to progress in the next few years – it’s quite possible that some of the repeatable parts of an actuary’s job may go away.
This doesn’t make the actuarial skillset obsolete, but we will need to adapt and be open to change.
My best advice is to be open to taking on a role or a project that is slightly outside your comfort zone. If you’ve only ever worked in reserving for a carrier, be open to taking on a broker-facing reinsurance pricing role.
If you’ve never worked in capital management but an opportunity comes up with your current company, why not take it and try something new for a couple of years?
This could be an actuarial or non-actuarial role. How about a role in Finance or Data? Working for a broker or an MGA?
Every time you make a change, you learn new things but you don’t leave your experiences behind entirely. You will constantly be using your experience and the skills you’ve already developed in new contexts.
As you get more senior, it can be really beneficial for a company to hire someone with outside experience. It’s easy to think of companies as these well-oiled machines that are built on perfectly symmetric information, but in practice companies have blind spots.
Being able to drive positive changes as a result of past experience is one of the most rewarding parts of being an actuary!
Summary
The actuarial toolkit will set you up with the technical skills to have a long and successful career. Augmenting it with a non-actuarial perspective and skillset can take you career to the next level.
