FoxPro for Actuarial (2)

I started to learn FoxPro when I started my first actuarial career after graduating from the university. My mentor in the actuarial department, Madam L, was also my FoxPro shifu (i.e. master / teacher / guru). Madam L was the reinsurance administrator in the department - by using FoxPro, she managed to do necessary reinsurance administration work for the entire individual life insurance business (more than 1 million policies) by her own, alone! By going through her programs and guidances, I picked up necessary skills to use FoxPro and create FoxPro programs for my reporting and experience studies tasks (my manager resigned three month after I joined the department - all his tasks became my tasks!) - until now I am still grateful to the guidance she provided to me previously.

When I was promoted to a team leader with junior staffs, similarly I needed to teach them the relevant FoxPro knowledge so that they had necessary skills to do the assigned tasks. At that time, there was no proper training set up to teach the juniors FoxPro skills - the juniors have to go through the existing programs and learn the FoxPro skills by their own, by going through a lot of try-and-error. Consequently, some FoxPro programs were not modified properly and eventually were discarded as they were already too messy; on the other hand, some FoxPro programs written by my "genius" colleagues cannot be understood by most people in the department. Hence, I decided to set up a proper "syllabus" for FoxPro to train my juniors.

I split my FoxPro training into 5 modules, and each module has its own training materials: (with quiz & exams!)

• Module 1: Introduction & Query
• Module 2: Query (2) - create & alter tables, multiple-table matching
• Module 3: Program (1)
• Module 4: Program (2) - looping, arrays, text merge
• Module 5: Program (3) - procedure & functions, advanced topics

I frequently reminded my staffs that "actuarial are NOT IT programmer" - we only need to learn the relevant skills that are required to carry out our actuarial tasks. In other words, we do not need to learn the entire FoxPro skill sets like IT programmers - such as the visual features of Visual FoxPro (as this is not really necessary to make the process efficient). Furthermore, the standard "syllabus" also helped me to ensure at least the same level of skill sets for the entire team - the FoxPro programs and coding would be set up in a similar manner, so that other users and future developers could understand the programs quickly and modifications could be done easily.

Does it mean that we cannot use commands not stated in the "syllabus"? Not really. For those commands which were considered "nice to have" and did not really improve the efficiency of the process, I normally advised them not to use it (I said: "...because you will not the person who uses the programs forever"). However, if any team member found out good commands that can help to improve the efficiency, I would amend the "syllabus" accordingly so that everyone could (well, actually "should"...) learn the new commands.

In fact, apart from FoxPro, my staffs and I also set up standard "syllabus" for Prophet training as well. Setting up such proper training modules (especially for the junior staffs) are crucial for the department's knowledge management. If the "knowledge" is managed well in the department, the department will be able to develop healthily - there is continuity in the skills developed and lessons learned in the past. Otherwise, the past mistakes will recur in the future and our successors will only learn what we have learned previously, instead of making progress on what we have developed and learned previously.

(In case you are looking for FoxPro training program for actuarial people, you may contact me at limcheebeng@hotmail.com to discuss further.)