Why becoming an actuary was the best career decision I ever made

Editor’s Note: In my February column, I asked insurance professionals to share their stories of how they came into the industry and why they stay. Here is a story one of our readers shared. ― Editor-in-Chief Rosalie Donlon

When I started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I had never heard the word “actuary.” The first time I heard the term was in linear algebra class. The university was offering a discounted actuarial exam (Exam 1), and our professors encouraged us to take the examination. I did and mentioned it in passing to my mom, who told my uncle, who, unbeknownst to me, was an actuary. He offered me a summer job and a chance to learn more about the profession — I gladly accepted. I found that I had passed the actuarial exam and spent a terrific summer working in a property & casualty insurance company. In the fall, I switched my major to actuarial science. I knew that I wanted to become a property & casualty actuary.

In 1992, I joined Allstate Insurance Company and got my first taste of just how dynamic the actuarial career could be. Hurricane Andrew had blown through southern Florida, and the insurance industry was grappling with the economic damages and impact from this single, catastrophic event. With Hurricane Andrew, actuaries were tackling difficult questions like determining the maximum number of policies that could be written in a hurricane-prone area to ensure that all affected policyholders would be indemnified when the next big hurricane hits. Another issue was how to properly price homeowners policies along the Florida coast when there was so little historical hurricane data. I soon realized that actuaries are instrumental in solving large-scale problems that impact the public and private sectors. In retrospect, actuaries played an important role in the evolution of hurricane modeling and risk management tools.

At its heart, I love the actuarial career because I love solving real-world problems using a combination of data/analytics, business context, and professionalism/objectivity. While mathematics and technical skills are a big piece of the puzzle, the art of solving problems requires constructing the right question, investigating the data and mathematical techniques to employ, and ultimately communicating results and influencing those who need to know the answer.

Today at Allstate, I am involved in solving problems like how recently passed laws legalizing marijuana affect road safety and the price of auto insurance and how brushfires are impacting the availability and affordability of homeowners insurance. My colleagues and I work to educate customers to recognize and minimize their risk of potential damage to their property, and we work on forecasting how autonomous cars will change the landscape of auto insurance in the future.

The kinds of problems actuaries are asked to solve change just as society changes. This creates a tremendous amount of variety that keeps actuaries on their toes — we rarely solve the same problem twice. As Mother Nature, regulation, technology, globalization, and aging populations keep evolving, so does the job and the opportunity for actuaries to solve real-world business problems. This constantly changing environment of new challenges and business problems to solve is one of the main reasons why I have stayed in this career for nearly 28 years now.

Another reason I have stayed with the profession so long is the sense of community that the actuarial profession brings. The U.S. property & casualty actuarial community is just under 10,000 professionals, but this smallish circle offers a great opportunity to network and meet other actuaries. The profession is also about giving back, whether it is strengthening our professional community or helping to foster the next generation of actuaries.

The Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), the organization that credentials and provides continuing education to property/casualty actuaries, has afforded me countless opportunities to give back to the profession I love, from interacting with universities, participating on university advisory panels, writing/grading actuarial exams, mentoring, giving presentations and reviewing the latest actuarial research. The CAS also continues to promote the actuarial career to university students through programs such as CAS Student Central, which has over 8,000 student members. The career has been so rewarding to me that I have been volunteering my time since 1998 and am currently honored to be serving as president of the Casualty Actuarial Society this year.

The actuarial profession is one that allows you to find yourself and reinvent yourself over the course of your career. In other words, you are not “locked-in” from day one when joining the profession. As you start the profession and study for exams, you will find the topics and products that will interest you the most. You can identify if you want to go deeper into a technical field or start doing managerial work.  You can start in ratemaking and then find you like reserving or enterprise risk management. Over time, you can easily transition from one actuarial discipline to another.

If you are currently in school and entertaining the actuarial profession as a potential career choice, please consider how much you enjoy solving real-world problems, how much you like variety and change, how much you value community and giving back, and how much you would appreciate reinventing yourself throughout your career.

If any or all of these considerations appeal to you, then the actuarial profession could also be the best career decision that you will ever make.

Steve Armstrong, FCAS, MAAA, has been a practicing P&C actuary for the last 27 years with a primary focus on personal lines ratemaking. Armstrong is currently vice president of pricing analytics & actuarial services at Allstate Insurance Company and is also currently serving as president of the Casualty Actuarial Society. He can be reached at sarm2@allstate.com. Opinions expressed here are the author’s own. 

For more articles on insurance careers, including available career programs, recruiting and fostering the next generation of talent and more, visit our Instant Insights page “Insurance Careers Month: Bridging the Talent Gap.”

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