What does job title progression look like in your company for an actuary/student from entry level to X?
I have never been in a company with very well defined job titles/progression but was discussing this with some auditors who have very well defined roles and titles, so much so that you must have at least X years of experience to have title Y. That made me curious to see if my experience in smaller consulting shops is different than what some of the (maybe) bigger companies out there do.
Large Canadian insurer
Actuarial Analyst - Less than 3 exams
Intermediate Actuarial Analyst - 3 or more exams
Senior Actuarial Analyst - ASA
*Used to jump straight to Director at FSA, but not anymore
*I think thereâs an Assistant Actuary in here now
Associate Director - FSA with x years experience/management and a Director position
Director - FSA with experience
Not really a thing in insurance. My wife is an auditor and yes how long you spent at a particular title is a hiring criterion. For example if it took you 4 years to get promoted from associate to senior associate (instead of 3 at PwC and 2 at the other B4 firms) it hurts your chances. Each B4 employee is aware of the timeline at their own company and that of the other B4 firms.
My companyâs documents describing this are all labeled âconfidential/proprietaryâ, so Iâll be vague.
We have seven actuarial job levels below officer level. While there is a matrix of experience vs exam status describing the levels, they arenât gospel.
The lowest level would be entry level (obviously), and students should expect to be promoted after about a year (if they werenât hired into the second level due to internships+exams).
The fourth level is where most students will land at ACAS. I do recall one former team member who just blew through exams a lot faster than normal; he was promoted to the fourth level when he got his FCAS, even though his experience was a bit light as compared to most ACASâs; but a bonus program kicks in at that level, and it just didnât seem right for a Fellow to not be eligible.
The top three levels are managerial or âindividual contributorâ roles. While Fellowship is increasingly desired as you go up (especially for the top level), itâs really your qualifications that drive promotions here.
I think ours is something like the following:
Actuarial Analyst [entry-level]
Sr. Actuarial Analyst [more experienced than entry-level, not ACAS]
Associate Actuary [at least ACAS, non-managerial]
Actuary [FCAS only, managerial only]
Director
Might be another step at entry-level, I canât remember. Thereâs also âActuarial Managerâ if youâre managing a group, but not director-level. If youâre not exam-track, âAnalystâ is replaced with âAssistantâ and the top spot is Sr. Actuarial Assistant.
One place prior, it was Actuarial Assistant and a bunch of grades, then Actuarial Associate and a bunch of grades. Then purportedly there was Assistant Actuary, but as guidelines were written it couldnât exist once Actuarial Manager was created. How someone progressed across the various grades was not clear at all, and there was a lot of âat the managerâs discretionâ language scattered about.
The titles are confidential/proprietary, or how someone progresses through them is confidential/proprietary?
The first would make zero sense. The second, ⌠really doesnât make any sense either, IMO, but Iâm also a pretty logical person so maybe the problem lies there.
I think Iâm the only person with the actuary title at my company.
thereâs a senior actuarial analyst
and a bunch of others taking exams but arenât titled actuarial analysts
The HR document where the formal titles, job descriptions, and requirements is marked confidential/proprietary. I donât think the information is particularly sensitive, and itâs probably not too different from other companiesâ (except for variation in job titles, perhaps)âŚbut I donât want to get in trouble for propagating corporate intellectual property.
(Seemingly every formalized document that isnât intended for public consumption gets tagged.)
Oh. One of those ways of doing things.
Two employers had fairly well-defined roles.
One had four actuarial student job levels.
The other had six when I started and transitioned to three. They sweetened the exam raises considerably when they reduced the number of promotions such that more of a studentâs pay increase came from exam raises and less from promotions. I think that was part of the motivation for the change since the companyâs exam raises were originally low compared to competitors, but the total comp was in line due to the fact that students were getting promoted all the freaking time. But when an interviewee would ask to see a copy of the student program⌠the exam raises looked crappy compared to other companies. By having fewer promotions and bigger exam raises that kept total compensation about the same but brought the exam raises in line with the rest of the industry.
I always explained about the many promotions/ crappy exam raises to interviewees, but I didnât interview every would-be student and Iâm not sure others explained it very well. I suspect we lost out on a few good candidates because of that.
Bump.
What do you call your data-specific people on the actuarial team? Everyone just bucketed as âdata scientistâ these days? Or like âSr Data Analyst, Actuarialâ ? Specifically non-exam track. The mention above on âAssistantâ is the only one I can specifically find.
Chief data analyst
One company called them Actuarial Specialist if i remember correctly
Ooo. Specialist sounds important. May use that. Was toying with the idea of an âAnalytics Analystâ but it just sounds so stupidly redundant I couldnât get past it.
I think âActuarial Specialistâ is used at Prudential still.
Thats when I last saw that one.
Med Econ analyst, sr analyst, consultant
Actuarial Data Analyst / Sr. Actuarial Data Analyst
Actuarial Data Specialist / Sr. Actuarial Data Specialist
Data Reporting Analyst Associate â Analyst â Analyst Sr
Consulting Research Associate â Analyst â Analyst Sr
At my company, âdataâ is one of the acuarial / peri-actuarial functions.
So, on our HR job title list, you could think of actuarial job titles being a matrix:
[Actuarial âlevelâ], [Function]
Actuaries doing âdataâ would have the same prefix on their complete job title as the equivalent-level actuaries in pricing, reserving, modeling, etc.
(âActuarial Specialistâ and âSenior Actuarial Specialistâ are used for the top two grades of individual contributors.)