While many people know they want to be an actuary in college and move straight to the insurance industry after graduation, a good segment of the actuarial population is career changers – people who worked in a different field, often for many years, before taking on an actuarial role. The reasons for making this switch are varied, but career changers generally bring valuable perspectives and experience to their actuarial roles. To give further insight on what it’s like to become an actuary after working in a different field, below are three current actuaries’ stories.

Mark Maenche, ACAS, Actuarial Manager at Travelers

My career experience prior to being an actuary was as an insurance agent. It is where I learned all about insurance policy language and the types of insurance that businesses would purchase. My degree was in actuarial science, but I didn’t pass any exams in college. Because I moved geographically across several states, I didn’t really have connections to pursue an actuarial career at that time. But, in 2012, I was looking for a better way to provide for my family and went back to pursuing actuarial science. I began studying and passed a couple exams. Finally, I landed an actuarial role at a small consulting company. I began to learn the actual day-to-day of being an actuary and continued to study for exams. I achieved Associateship in the Casualty Actuarial Society in 2020.

My experience as an insurance agent has been invaluable in the actuarial roles I have held. Understanding insurance policy and commercial insurance coverages has benefitted me when working on pricing risks. I recently changed jobs and joined Travelers working in the middle market actuarial department. Although I am new, I am excited by the collaborative nature that is part of the culture of the company. It seems that there is almost always something new to learn!

I would recommend being an actuary if you are excited by analyzing risk and working with data. If you love Excel and using various languages (SQL, Python) to manipulate data, you probably would love working in the actuarial space as well.

The best advice I could give to someone changing careers to be an actuary is to never think it is too late to pursue your passion. If you put in effort to learn what it takes to be an actuary and you can get comfortable with what you believe the rigors, tasks and daily workload will be, then go for it!

Ellen Myerson, ACAS, Actuarial Associate at Coaction Specialty Insurance

After years as a math teacher, I decided I wanted to switch careers, and I knew I wanted something analytical. I saw that actuary was one of the top careers in U.S. News and World Report’s top jobs list, so I started studying for Exam P.

I started out as an actuarial analyst in pricing for a private passenger auto carrier. I enjoyed continually learning with each new project. After four years in pricing, I rotated to reserving and have worked in a reserving role ever since. I became an ACAS about five years into my career. Last year I moved to Coaction Specialty Insurance and have enjoyed the challenge of working with different lines and also reserving when data is fairly thin.

For those considering becoming an actuary, I would definitely recommend this career. We answer interesting questions, there are opportunities to work on a wide variety of projects and I’m always learning.

For someone considering becoming an actuary, the best advice I could give is to ask a lot of questions. Always be thinking about how all the pieces (underwriting, claims handling, pricing, economic factors, frequency, severity, loss development patterns) fit together. And of course, be prepared for lots of studying!

Peter Soulen, FCAS, Actuarial Director at Travelers

When I was a physics/math major at a liberal arts college, a probability/stats professor encouraged me to consider becoming an actuary. Instead, for my first career, I completed a Ph.D. in the geophysical sciences and   went into academia, doing research in atmospheric physics using satellite data and computer models to study the Earth’s ozone layer and cloud cover characteristics for global warming calculations. After several years, I wanted to move to a different city, which didn’t have a large atmospheric research group, so I had to change careers.

 While I was discerning what my next career should be, I was fortunate to have family and friends who were credentialed actuaries, both on the life side and the property & casualty side. I decided to become a beginning actuarial student at a large insurance company. When I was first hired, I had not yet taken any actuarial exams. (At that time in the 2000s, passing several exams was not required to land such an entry-level job because many students had recently left the actuarial profession to take more lucrative jobs in IT.)

Although I started on the SOA life actuarial track, I achieved my Associateship and Fellowship designations in the Casualty Actuarial Society in 2010 and 2012. I am grateful to have wound up working in P&C at Travelers. Rotating through several positions, I’ve worked with a much greater variety of coverages and met so many more people, nationally and internationally. I’m also enjoying learning more sophisticated analytics. I recently rotated to Travelers’ middle market commercial accounts group in business insurance, where I am excited by the always-increasing list of greater projects, collaborative culture and high quality of training programs for managers.

When switching to my actuarial career, it helped that I had previous background in computer programming, project management and physics-level math. It also helped that I already had experience presenting technical subjects in atmospheric physics at a variety of levels: to my peer-scientists, engineers, undergraduates and general public audiences. P&C insurance needs to be a highly collaborative business among underwriters, claims adjusters, attorneys who represent the company, regulatory specialists, product managers and data scientists as well as actuaries. It takes a wide variety of diverse perspectives for a large company to succeed!

If you like digging into data from a variety of sources, collaborating with others, discovering the story behind the data and communicating that story to anyone else who needs to know it, you would likely do well as an actuary. You would likely also do very well as a statistician or data scientist! However, it is easier to make real discoveries in data if one is already familiar with the subject of the data, and the actuarial insurance profession is already good at (and continually getting better at) training its professionals to understand both sophisticated models and details of insurance data.

Becoming an actuary, especially as a career-changer, may be more straightforward than advancing in other professions. The big questions are: (1) are you willing to put in the work to pass a large number of challenging and demanding exams about mathematical and fact-based content, and (2) are you willing to uphold the high standards of a code of professional conduct? Some women have told me that they became actuaries because they were confident that their achievements would be judged more objectively, so they would advance faster. I am proud that the CAS is becoming more committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Whether you become a data scientist or an actuary, I recommend two things: (1) Work not only to pass the exams, but also to master the syllabus as much as you can. People who master the syllabus tend to complete projects more quickly and teach less experienced personnel better, so they advance more rapidly to either higher technical or managerial roles. (2) Always keep working on your skills for teaching and relating to a variety of people. Outstanding skill at uncovering a new trend means little if others cannot understand exactly what you discovered, how the methods you used to discover it are reasonable and how important the result is. No matter how good you are at math and modeling, we could all improve our emotional intelligence.