It's March already! Before we know it, a quarter of 2018 will be history. And it brings high school (and college!) seniors a little closer to graduation!

I've gotten a few emails over the last couple of weeks asking for advice on whether an actuarial career or career in data analytics would be a better career path/better course of study. My short answer, and probably an answer no one wants to hear - you can't go wrong with either. My detailed answer is below if you keep reading!

Before making this decision, it is so important to understand yourself. What is your passion as it relates to a future career? What type of projects do you enjoy working on? Are you a very disciplined person? What factors motivate and drive you?

Well, guess what? If you like problem solving and critical thinking - you can't go wrong with either! Similarly, if you like coding and learning how to develop solutions using code, again, either choice would be great! Problem solving and critical thinking is part of the day-to-day job responsibilities whether you are an analytics professional or actuarial professional and there is quite a bit of overlap in the technical skills you'll need to have.

If taking exams isn't your strong suit, it might be worth reconsidering the actuarial career path. Exams are a HUGE part of being an actuary. They say you have to study 100 hours for each hour of the exam. So that's easily at least 300 hours per exam minimum (more in my personal experience). Are you going to have the discipline to follow a rigid study schedule in order to get through 10 exams (assuming the FCAS track)? If you end up failing an exam, will you be able to continue to stay motivated in order to pass the next exams?

If having letters after your name from an established, world renowned organization is important to you, then following the actuarial career path may be a good fit for you. This also helps set you apart from many other non-credentialed professionals. I do have to say, the feeling of seeing that "PASS" message on my three CBT exams was probably one of the best feelings I've ever had. To work so hard to achieve something and get the results you're looking for is incredible. 

A career in analytics will allow you to do similar work as an actuary, without the added stress of all of the studying. Sure, you won't get nice bonuses and raises for each exam you pass, but if you start your career at a great company and do well, you should be just as fine. Following a career in analytics may also be good if you enjoy variety in the work you do and don't want to limit yourself to a specific industry. In many cases, as an actuary you will mainly be working in the insurance industry - there are some positions out there outside of insurance, but they aren't as common. If you want to be doing cool analytics or models for a big name, like Google, Coca Cola, Netflix, or NBC, analytics would be the way to go. 

(Shoutout to my favorite student loan paying app, Giving, use code SB346381 to join!)
​
Student loans won't pay themselves.. isn't that the truth?!? Between student loans and the cost of living in some major cities, it's understandable why salary would also be a key component of this decision. I just grabbed a quick comparison from glassdoor below, but I highly encourage you to do your own research based on some of the entry level positions you're seeing in your area. You may also want to throw data scientist into the mix if that's the path you're looking to pursue. 

In my opinion, I wouldn't be too concerned with the salaries (or job security for that matter) for either analytics or actuarial roles since they're pretty similar. I definitely wouldn't allow that to be a deciding factor in your career choice, but it is something to be aware of as you are choosing your line of work. Given the nature of actuarial and analytics work, there will continue to be a demand over the coming years. If you're worried about future job security, then I would be careful to choose a solid company and become an expert in your field sooner rather than later.

If you keep going back and forth between pursuing an actuarial career or a career in analytics, my advice would be to start with the actuarial career path for a couple of reasons. 

This may not be true for everyone, but the longer you are out of school/university, the more you lose in terms of your study habits and routines, making it more difficult to get back into the swing of things. If you start studying (and passing!) actuarial exams during college, you'll be off to a really great start and have a solid foundation as you continue through the exam track as you're working full-time.

I've always had so many positive things to say to career changers interested in pursuing an actuarial career later on in their life, but the truth is it is HARD. It's definitely possible and there are a lot of successful career changers who have gotten great jobs in the field, but it's much easier to secure a role earlier on in your career. 

To pursue a career in analytics after trying out the actuarial path will be a lot easier since there are so many analytics careers out there and a lot of the work you do as an actuary - especially coding in Python, SAS, R, etc. - will be 100% relevant to many analytics jobs out there. It will always be more challenging to flip from analytics to actuarial due to the large number of qualified actuarial candidates at the earlier stages of the career.  

The review process at my firm is currently wrapping up, but there are also a lot of performance reviews that are typically conducted at the end of the calendar year (and hopefully there is some type of feedback process in the interim!). If you're like me and just went through your year-end review process, you can use this article to help set up a game plan for the full year instead of just the second half!

Performance reviews can bring on a lot of emotions: excitement, anxiety, hope, dread, regret - the list goes on! In my opinion, the most important thing you can do to make your performance reviews a more pleasant experience is to stay ahead of the process and actively think about your performance throughout the year. You don't want to be blindsided at year-end with a subpar review, so it's important to start thinking about your performance NOW!

Read more for six ways to take advantage of the rest of the year in order to have a great year-end review!

If your company does not have a standardized process for mid-year feedback, make sure to set up a discussion with your manager or equivalent to figure out what areas you are performing strongly in and where you need to improve. If you don't receive feedback throughout the year, it might also be good for you to have a similar conversation once every quarter to make sure you are on the same page as your manager. If you are going to have a conversation like this with your manager, I suggest sending a quick email a couple days before letting them know so they can have time to put some thought into your performance. Don't just walk into their office and ask - it puts them on the spot and they might miss some valuable information that they would've thought of if they had time to prepare for the discussion. 

For the remainder of the year, focus on keeping up your strengths while putting additional energy into the areas you can improve. If there are more than three areas you should improve in, you may want to discuss with your manager if there are a few that you should really focus on in the immediate future. Improvements in some areas may also lead to improvements in others, so try to kill two birds with one stone if possible! For example, if your manager says you need to work on improving your communication skills and how you work with others on your team, improving the communication aspect may help improve how you work with others. 

In most cases, you don’t need to be an expert at all tools - be knowledgeable enough to use all, an expert in a few and focus the rest of your energy on improving soft skills to become better at your job and a better leader. These improvements will help you shine in your year-end review!

Is there something you know how to do that others on your team may not know? Are you an expert at excel and want to share some time saving tips? Set up some time to teach others on your team when work is slow. Having a team who is knowledgeable on basic processes and some time saving tricks can save everyone time and reduce frustrations during busy periods.

Reach out to your manager and offer to lead a training session so your team can improve their skills. Even if you set up some quick 15-30min learning sessions to teach some lesser known tips and tricks to speed up day-to-day work, that could still have a huge impact! ​Your initiative and drive to improve the team will not go unnoticed.This could also help set you up for a promotion sooner than you would expect!

It's not uncommon to see trustworthiness listed as a category on performance reviews. In everyday situations, trustworthiness is telling the truth or being able to keep a secret or any other related action. In the business world, trustworthiness can mean consistently completing your work prior to deadlines with minimal errors. 

In order to become the go-to person for your manager, your manager needs to see you as trustworthy. Make sure you are completing your projects in a reasonable amount of time with no errors. Don't delay just because you're way ahead of deadlines - finish the project and find something else you can help with. And this should go without saying, but DO NOT sit on a completed project without notifying the reviewer or manager that it's done. No one likes getting an email to review something on a Wednesday when the timestamp on the file was for the prior Friday...

In addition to providing error-free deliverables on time, make sure you are also engaging with your manager. If your manager reaches out to the team asking for thoughts or help on something, make sure you reply! Even if you think other people will respond with the same thoughts, reply anyway! If you have a meeting with your manager, don't just respond with 'yes' or 'no'. Ask questions. Provide your thoughts (if you are in disagreement, let your manager know and provide your reasoning in a proactive way!). When a manager is looking for their right hand man or woman, they're looking for someone to count on across the board - especially someone they can rely on for their insights, whether they are in agreement or not (just don't be too negative!).

Summer is usually a slower time of year. Use this time to better understand processes and see how you can improve them to make them more efficient. A lot of times, if you ask why something is done the way it currently is, the response will be "it's always been done that way." Don't take that as an answer! Especially if your company has started using new technologies since the creation of the process that could potentially reduce processing time and increase efficiency. 

Focus on processes that take a lot of time. Is there a monthly or quarterly project that is really manual in nature, taking 10+ hours? Is there a way to automate the process to reduce the time to 5 hours? Even if you can't code, bring up your idea to your manager and see if you could team up with one of the experienced programmers on your team to implement your proposed solution. As long as your not busy with regular with, the manager will most likely be open to improving the process!

This is especially important if you are relatively new to the group - a benefit of coming in as an "outsider" is being able to bring in a different perspective. If others on the team have been working on a project for a while, they might not be able think of improvements as easily as a newcomer with outside experience.

Forward thinking plays a huge role in career advancement. Developing ideas to drive efficiencies and creating better processes is a step in the right direction!

If you're taking actuarial exams, chances are there will be an area on the performance review relating to exams and professional development. If for any reason, you don't think you will be able to sit for or pass an actuarial exam during your performance review period, check with your manager to see if your company will sponsor any other exams, such as CPCU or IDMA exams. 

I wouldn't recommend specifically skipping an actuarial exam to take a different type of exam, but if you have a month or two between studying for actuarial exams, you could easily take some of that time to study for a different exam. For example, CPCU exams can help you build on your insurance knowledge, provide a break from the intense studying for actuarial exams, and still allow you to continue your professional development. After studying for actuarial exams, a lot of the other insurance exams will be much easier and won’t require as much studying to pass. 

While it's ideal to pass actuarial exams in a timely manner, reaching out to your manager regarding alternative exams when you're stuck on an actuarial exam will show that you are proactive about your professional development. If another type of exam will count toward professional development, it can also help relieve some of the stress from failing the actuarial exam. It can also help boost your confidence so you'll be in a positive mindset for your next actuarial exam!

If your company’s review process requires a self evaluation or write up on what you’ve done the prior year, how do you remember it all? A year is a long time and it’s easy to forget some of the minor accomplishments you’ve had. Early last year, I stumbled across an article providing excellent advice for capturing your accomplishments - each Friday, take a few minutes at the end of the day and capture your biggest accomplishment for that week in a spreadsheet (at the end of the year you would have close to 52 accomplishments listed).

Sometimes, the accomplishments may be small, like learning how to create a macro in VBA. Other accomplishments may be a successful deployment of a tool/model you’ve been working on for months. No accomplishment is too small for this list and when it comes time for your self-evaluation at the end of the year, you will have a large list to choose from instead of trying to remember everything off the top of your head!

​If you are lucky enough to work for a company that doesn’t require self evaluations, this is still a good habit to have since it can provide perspective on your career and also give you some talking tips when you run into someone from senior management!

Have any questions on the topics in this article? Looking to get advice on your current situation? I'm always open to chatting - send me an email or message me on LinkedIn!

How do you plan to close out the year strong? Comment below!

If you're an actuary, you probably love data. Or studying. Or days off for studying. Or some of the above. And whether you love data or not, you work with it daily and most likely perform analyses or create models. As technology becomes smarter and faster, companies are finding more ways to track information and collect data. This influx of additional data is great for building models and testing assumptions, but can at times make other analyses more complex and complicated. 

Excel is an actuary's best friend, but sometimes even excel can't handle the data if there's too much of it (I used to get the "not enough memory" error way too many times)! There are also quite a few limitations if you are only using excel to review and analyze your data. Based on my experience:

• Pivot Tables and Conditional Formatting are okay for reviewing data, but you can't compare multiple dimensions at once. 
• Filtering and flagging data only goes so far - in many cases you are still scrolling through data reviewing other attributes. 
• You don't get a good overview of your data in excel - it's important to know your population and it's not easy to get an all encompassing overview.  

So let’s talk about data visualization. Sure, data visualization may not be necessary in some cases, but I hope by the end of this post, if you’re someone who thinks “why visualize data when I can easily perform my analysis in excel” that you may have more of an interest on how data visualization can enhance your work. Or better yet, maybe you'll get inspired and develop a proof of concept to show your boss in order to bring in a data visualization tool! Keep reading for five examples of how data visualization can enhance your work as an actuary!

No matter what type of work you do as an actuary, there may be times where you will need to review data quality to make sure the data is expected. Or maybe you need to check the outcome of a model to see what the data looks like. Typically, a lot of this review is done in excel and results in scrolling through rows and rows of data or analyzing pivot tables. There's only so much you can see in a table - this is why when you're reviewing loss development triangles, it's usually best to use the red/yellow/green conditional formatting. Using a visualization tool, such as Tableau or Power BI can help you quickly draw insights and identify the data points you should focus on.

Example: Suppose you need to review claim amounts and premium amounts for a specific period for personal auto policies. Maybe you also care about the deductible amount and age of the policyholders. You'd most likely use a pivot table to review this information, but you could miss the big picture. If you use a visualization tool, you'd be able to plot a scatterplot with claim amount and premium amount on the axis, with each point's size based on the deductible amount and color based on age or an age bucket.

One of the main reasons I love visualizing data is because of the versatility of reviewing multiple dimensions of data at once. It can save a lot of time and help you focus on the most important information!

If you're exploring attributes affecting a pricing or reserving model or doing data quality on specific sets of data, it may be more efficient to use data visualizations to being your review process so you know which characteristics of the data to focus on. 

Example: You may be in a situation where you need to analyze claims for a specific line of business and find patterns for specific attributes of data. Are there specific zip codes that are typically reporting more damage on vehicles? Could the age or number of drivers on a policy be impacting this uptick? A visualization tool can help you explore multiple characteristics on one dashboard so you can see how they interact with one another. Once you know which characteristics you want to focus on, you can finalize your dashboard and any time you have new data you want to review, it's just a quick upload with minimal set-up. 

Data visualizations allow for a lot of versatility when it comes to comparing data, especially year over year comparisons. If you're doing data quality, you may have one set threshold for all of the data when it may make more sense looking at different thresholds for each state. This would add a lot more time to a review in excel, but using data visualization, these thresholds, when used with filters, would make the process more efficient and accurate.

It's also really easy to add in new calculations in Tableau or Power BI once the source data has been added - so if you're in the middle of creating a dashboard and want to see a new combination of data or bucket the data, you can easily do so in the visualization software.

Example: There may be a time where you need to compare data year over year to make sure different groupings of data remain consistent. Maybe you are looking at the loss ratio or a variety of other ratios. Depending on your dataset, there are a variety of ways you could visualize year over year data to compare, from bar charts to scatterplots to heatmaps. You could even use side by side box and whisker plots to see how the population of data has changed year over year.

​When using data visualizations to filter and compare data, the possibilities are endless, as well as the insights that can be drawn from the data. Data visualizations can also make your comparisons and data checks more effective! Just another reason I think data visualization is a great alternative!

There may be some situations where you want to see what your data looks like without certain subsets of data. There isn't an easy way to do this in excel. You could create a VBA macro that could exclude certain records with a click of a button, but why go through all of that trouble when you could do the same thing using visualization software and get a better overview of how different metrics change when excluding data?

Example: If you are interested in how specific lines of business are trending over time and you want to identify and exclude outliers causing large shifts, you could easily do this using visualization tools. With all of the additional features in tableau, you can also have visuals interact where you'd be able to hover over a bar in one chart which could highlight all of the data making up that specific bar in a different chart. 

Depending on the work you do, you may find a lot of relationships in your data which you must use to make assumptions, create models or test for data quality. There may also be processes in place for you to adequately review these relationships. However, when done the right way, data visualizations and interactions between visuals can show you additional information in seconds that may take hours to find in excel. Interactive dashboards can also help you get to the problem areas of your data and see the makeup of those problem areas with quick drill-down features. 

Example: When reviewing certain relationships, such as a loss ratio, you may see that a specific state stands out and you want to drill down to find the line of business causing the high loss ratio. You also want to see if it is one policy driving the loss ratio or many and if they have any other similar characteristics. In excel, you might be able to set specific thresholds and filter on these thresholds to find that data, but you could be missing some other important information. Maybe there is an issue with a specific product across the board, but you only found one point of data above the set threshold, so you let it go. Using a dashboard with multiple visualizations, allowing you to drill-down to the data could quickly alert you to these patterns without missing any specifics due to set thresholds.

I've found the drill-down capabilities of Tableau and Power BI to be very useful in identifying specific areas of data to focus on. It is a lot quicker to find these data points using a variety of visuals than it is to find these relationships in excel. 

I have experience using both Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, but there are also plenty of other data visualization tools out there, too. Check out the articles below for more information!

​If you are interested in applying data visualizations to your actuarial work, I'd be happy to speak more  - just send me a message on LinkedIn use the contact form on this site!

Related Articles:
The 38 Best Tools for Data Visualization 
Tableau vs Power BI: Comparing Pros and Cons

The last few months have been strange and refreshing at the same time. This is the first time in over two years that I wasn't sitting for a CAS exam during this time. I was able to spend some quality time binge watching a few shows on Netflix without worrying about whether or not I was on track for studying. I was able to randomly decide to go for a walk whenever the weather was nice without having a set time or destination. I've been able to go out to happy hours. The list goes on. 

At the same time, thinking back over the last few years, I can't remember anything I did that made me prouder or gave me the same satisfaction that passing an actuarial exam did. On more than one occasion, I remember holding back tears of joy as I was sitting at Prometric going through the check-out process after the exam. And I have to say that's the one thing I do miss about the exams - that rewarding feeling at the end, knowing that all of the hard work and sacrifices paid off.  

Regardless of how your next exam sitting goes, it should be a time of reflection. Actuarial exams are a process and sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in the process instead of taking on each exam individually. 

If you pass your last preliminary exam or pass an exam granting you the ACAS/ASA designation, consider taking an exam sitting off. Enjoy the years of hard work you've put in and allow yourself a chance to recharge. "Bottle up" that feeling you have when you find out you pass and use that to keep you moving forward. 

If you don't pass your next exam, take some time to reflect on it. Was it the first time you failed the exam? Have you sat for it multiple times without passing? There are different reasons for failing and it's important to figure out why you're failing. If it's your study habits, there are solutions for that (read below for more info!). If you aren't enjoying the material, making it hard for you to retain the information, you'll need to find a way to make it interesting. Or maybe you've reached the point that deep down you don't care anymore, but you don't want to quite because you're "too invested".

If you take on each exam individually, you're never too invested and there's always time to reflect and change your future path. Failing an exam isn't an end all be all - it's a chance to look inside yourself and potentially make a change that will lead to passing your next exam or finding new opportunities outside of actuarial work. It's a win-win!

Back when I was studying for exams, I spent way too much time googling effective ways to study for and pass actuarial exams. I never really found anything too useful. This May, Actuarial Exam Tactics: Learn More, Study Less is being released by two young actuaries from Drake University. Both Roy Ju, FSA and Mike Jennings, ASA are younger than 25 and have a lot of great tips to share. Roy became the youngest person to ever receive the FSA designation in 2015 at the age of 20, so he definitely has a lot to share on how to study efficiently to pass more and fail less!

If you're not interested in the book, you may want to take a study break to read some articles written by these guys and learn why Roy swears by a meal of pancakes and cereal the night before an exam!!

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY!

Whether you pass your upcoming exam or fall short, make sure to reserve a copy of their book - it's bound to give you some great advice for future exams! There is also a book giveaway and contest surrounding this book release! Enter for a chance to win a free copy of Actuarial Exam Tactics: Learn More, Study Less, an ACTEX Study Manual and Flashcards for an exam of your choice, or an ACTEXeLearning Webinar. The giveaway ends May 15th and winners will be announced May 16th.