Chat with an Actuarial Junior Staff

I have a chat with my ex-staff, J, last Friday in UAT Room. I was assisting the Business Analyst (BA) in supervising the new product User Acceptance Test (UAT), and Jeff was one of the user from Actuarial Department.

Since J joined the company, he has been working in the system implementation team – well, in short, most of his work is to carry out UAT for new products and migrated products. I asked him: “How long you have been here already?” He answered 2 years, and he hasn’t had any chance to really involve in other actuarial works like pricing and valuation. I was a bit worried with his limited experience – I told him it was high time for he to start to learn other types of jobs, as he doesn’t even have any experience in preparing the statistical reporting (like new business report & termination report) or experience studies (like mortality study and persistency study). The situation will be more difficult when he becomes a senior executive but doesn’t know how to really do a junior executive’s work.

J seemed to be not so agree with my opinions… He told me some more senior actuarial people told him that it is OK to work in other areas for a few years and switch to Actuarial Department later, just like Ms. S who has been working as an underwriter before she joined actuarial department. I respected their opinions, but I told him I have another view: when Ms. S graduated from the university, the supply of actuarial talent was very low, hence she did not face any obstacle in switching to actuarial field; however, the current environment (in Malaysia’s actuarial industry) has changed, the supply seems to exceed the demand, especially for fresh graduates. If J continues to do system work for another year without learning any pricing/valuation work, I’m doubt if any other employer will pay a senior executive salary when he gets a pricing/valuation job in other companies – especially if he has passed many papers.

We didn’t really have any concrete conclusion for our conversation… Well, there is no right or wrong answer. But I do really hope he will progress well in his career.