For rotations I’ve only ever seen 18 or 24 months. SOA
A year seems too short. More than 2 years is too long. 18 months is kind of a sweet spot, IMO, but it’s easier to have the rotations at a uniform time of year.
The place that had two-year rotations did have them every year. So it was possible for a student to stay in a role for three years and essentially switch rotation cycles. Or if staffing needs changed then a student might rotate out after only one year. But those were rare.
I’ve seen rotations occur twice a year, so while 2 years is the target, it can easily range from 18 to 30 months depending on circumstances.
I’ve seen rotations from 3 month to 3 years.
I’d say that the bulk of the jobs I see are either on a 3 month cycle or an annual cycle. For the 3 month cycle, I think rotations of 15-18 months are ideal. For jobs with an annual cycle, I think there’s a great deal to be gained by seeing the whole process twice, and I prefer 2 year rotations.
I’ve read this sentence several times and I have no idea what the 3 months is referring to.
From the first sentence I thought you meant the rotation lasted 3 months, which seems absurd. But this sentence leads me to believe that this is NOT what you meant. But I’m still unsure what you DO mean.
I have seen rotations that last from 3 months to 3 years.
And separately, we have types of work that tend to happen in a cycle. Much of what we do is either something that’s done quarterly or something that’s done annually. For instance, we might update pricing models annually. Or we may update our reserve indications quarterly. That’s what I mean by “cycle time”.
For jobs that have a quarterly cycle time, or similarly short time-horizons, I think rotations of 15-18 months are good. For jobs that have an annual cycle time – which is a lot of jobs where I work – I prefer 2 year rotations.
When I am supervising someone on a 3 month rotation, I don’t assign them anything in our regular processes, instead, I give them a special project that can be once and done within 3 months.
Talk about a turnover problem
Wow, this is stunning to me. Everywhere I’ve ever worked it’s such a Herculean task to get someone’s official reporting structure changed that it wouldn’t be worth it for 3 months.
I’ve seen departments going through a slow phase “loan” an associate to another department where there may or may not be some transfer of funds to compensate for the fact that Joe is officially in Department A but temporarily helping out Department B.
Or tasks get assigned to Corporate Actuarial which is supposed to help out everyone so it’s not as big a deal financially or something like that.
I’ve never seen a transfer where it’s known ahead of time that it’s only going to last 3 months.
That’s kind of like a summer internship. And those are pretty inefficient for getting projects done, in my experience. But wildly efficient in determining “is this someone we want working for us for longer than 3 months”… which is the real point of the internship from the employer’s perspective.
I worked for a place that started all actuarial trainees with a series of a few 3 month rotations. They were technically in some central department for all that time, to avoid the friction of officially transferring them. And they all technically had the same person as their manager, but they actually worked for the actuary who was supervising that rotation.
That being said… It takes like an hour of my effort and an hour of effort for the old manager and maybe a couple hours for someone in hr to transfer management in our system. When I’ve hired someone internally it was never a big deal.
This matches my experience for dealing with HR in an ideal transfer where nothing goes wrong.
It’s getting all of the IT permissions that is the real hassle. Everywhere I’ve ever worked. Actuarial and non-actuarial alike.
And if there are HR-related issues with the transfer then it takes longer.
Like one issue that I had when I was a rotatee: when I rotated in August I had used 2 of my 10 sick days that were use-it-or-lose-it on a calendar year basis.
Got sick one random day in November. I have 0 sick days remaining. WTH??? I should have 8 days left.
Turns out that since I “started” in August, I was eligible for 0 sick days, which is how new hires were allocated sick days. Vacation days were screwed up too. Why was this only an issue with me and not every other rotatee? Oh, they decided to try something different with me to address some other HR issue.
It was mountains of paperwork by many parties to get that straightened out. At one point my boss said to just screw it and not show up but mark my time sheet as though I worked. Although the taxes wouldn’t have come out right if I’d done that (close though) and they did eventually fix it.
When that rotation ended they gave me too many floating holidays but after the first ordeal, all bosses said “screw it… you deserve an extra floating holiday. Take it and don’t feel an ounce of guilt” so I did.
Oh and then my ESPP shares got screwed up too, but that was in my favor. I had a heckuva time convincing HR that they awarded me too much stock.
Really wish I were less Type A sometimes as it would’ve been nice to keep the extra and when I finally figured out HR’s error… no way would they have EVER caught it.
Me and my stupid integrity!
But all of the HR hassles combined pale in comparison to IT.
I’ve never seen anything like that associated with internal transfers. IT permissions can be a nuisance, but they set up interns and trainees with all the common actuarial permissions across departments to facilitate the rotations.
Interesting… that’s not been a thing anywhere I’ve ever worked.
I guess it’s the combination of both being Type A and having integrity. If I wasn’t Type A I wouldn’t have noticed and if I didn’t have integrity I wouldn’t have cared!
For the 3 month rotation bit – I could see that as being viable for EL actuaries at a big company. I imagine that it’s like a sequence of internships, to provide the EL employee a bit of context into the nature of the work, so that they’re a bit more clueful when they land in their first longer-term position.
At my company, we have a “standard actuarial profile” that includes permissions to a less-sensitive common actuarial shared drive, Office, R, SQL Server, etc., etc., and then some departments/teams have their own additional shared files and/or specific tools (especially those where licensing is on a per-seat basis) that we’re used to granting/removing access as interns/contractors/employees change positions. The add/delete process is semi-automated, so it isn’t really a big deal.
Yup. that’s exactly how it worked. It sometimes took creativity to come up with good intern projects (although in some teams there were very natural projects) but overall I think it worked very well.
And the IT permissions were not a big deal, because someone had already solved that problem.
Hmmm, where I’ve worked this department uses SQL these other two departments use SAS but their stuff is on completely different servers with different permissions. And one department uses Axis while another uses PolySystems and a third uses something homegrown. It hasn’t been so simple to switch.
And the folks in Department A work for ABC Insurance Company, and the folks in Department B work for ABC Assurance Company and the folks in Department C work for ABC Services while the folks in Department D work for ABC Corporation that is the parent company of the first three. The corporation gets a tax break on the salaries for the folks in the Services company because… REASONS. And the Insurance and Assurance companies need to be separate entities because… OTHER REASONS.
So switching back & forth is complicated.
And don’t get me started on tracking hours to be billed to the New York subsidiaries!
That sounds nice.
Although I’ve been consistently told across multiple employers that at least some of the permissions stuff is necessary because they have to have controls around certain processes and data and such from an audit / regulatory perspective.
Obviously using different software/languages is not a regulatory issue though.
As a supervisor I had to sign off quarterly on which stuff each person on my team needed access to. It was annoying. Kind of glad I’m not supervising anyone any more.