This presumes that some companies really care about taking care of employees, even if it means getting rid of lousy managers. Some of them would rather have lousy managers because … value of what they claim to provide, even when evidence shows they’re not that good.
Disagree with the universality of this statement.
Won’t disagree that for those just starting out without dependents that this might be a good philosophy; but for some, there are other factors that need to be weighed.
I worked for an employer who knowingly promoted a high-performing employee into a level Employee very clearly wasn’t qualified for and was then shocked, SHOCKED, that Employee couldn’t handle the work so they fired Employee. It was ridiculous.
(Job required a degree in math/stats, and really most of the people had masters degrees in stats or even a couple had PhDs and this poor Employee had a bachelors in business administration. Had done well in courses like business calculus, but that’s well short of what the job required.)
This is the job where annualized turnover at times exceeded 100% (calculated from the day I started working there).
A couple of years into that (a few months after I left) the senior managers finally figured out that the middle managers were terrible managers. The middle managers were excellent worker bees, which is why they’d been promoted into management. But many good worker bees are not good managers and it took them way too long to realize that.
It’d be like promoting the very best claims analyst/adjuster into an actuarial role and then firing them for being a bad actuary. Now you’ve lost a great claims analyst. Dumb da dumb dumb DUMB!
3 Likes
This is why I’ve seen actuaries who weren’t cutting it being offered jobs in other departments.
2 Likes
I have really only seen that when they weren’t advancing on exams properly
I do love working with our IT or data people who have actuarial background
3 Likes
Same on both counts
How exactly did one promotion take her from being competent to overpaid on a PIP? How much is an analyst I to II promotion anyway? That doesn’t make sense.
Sounds like either someone decided they didn’t like her early on, or she had some performance drop off due to external issues, or low expectations for too long. Or the original promotion was undeserved.
I would have had her switch teams again without a PIP, let her know the new manager doesn’t know about the PIP, but that she needs to contribute at a higher level (yes this could mean working much harder than others to catch up, also smarter), and get a second opinion from that manager after a year. Then a PIP for a half year if the second manager comes to the same conclusions without prior expectations.
A second chance on a blank slate can do wonders. I know from personal experience.
Meanwhile, no raise, so inflation would have done its magic and the promotion effect would have gone away.
If the second manager then has a good opinion and wants to promote again, there would of course be more hesitation…
This would make sense if not for the promotion. A manager who promotes someone they know is incompetent is a truly awful manager, or maybe a coward. It shouldn’t be that hard even for “nice guys” to say that someone’s performance needs to get better for a promotion, even one driven by exam passing.
2 Likes
I don’t think she was competent to do analyst II work, although not because she didn’t have it in her but the work in her first 3 years was just way too easy so she just didn’t get the challenging projects that would have developed her appropriately. I suppose one analogy would be when valedictorians from noncompetitive schools get clobbered by middle-of-the-pack students from competitive schools when they get to college because they were unprepared for it. Had they gone to a more competitive school, they’d probably be fine.
So she just didn’t have the experience required to do the work but had she been on one of the other teams I think she would have at worst been mediocre enough to get by in that second position.
1 Like
How much do you think her future career trajectory is hurt by this?
In the grand scheme of things not much although at her age it probably seems like a big chunk of time. I’ve seen some more experienced managers, like with 20 yrs exp who missed out on huge chunks of experience (as in how are you even employed bad) so this is small in comparison. If she tries hard I think she can eventually bounce back.
I was in a similar situation and have a fear that this would happen to me if I switched companies. I kind of want to, but here I at least have my boss to back me and a couple average(met expectations, etc.) reviews as evidence that I am not mediocre, even though my job has been a joke. What is your advice on how to recover from this?
2 Likes
what level are you at?
I started at a company where the pre-ASAs basically only did computer programming. I did not feel like I was learning how to be an actuary. Especially since most of the programs were written so it was running and maintenance. I did learn some really good customer service skills as I did have to deal with customers in one of my rotations.
It was pretty much felt that you either stayed there or you had to get out before becoming a know nothing ASA. I did the latter. Going to a new program as a student, not much should be expected of you. It is easy to start over.
If you are already an ASA, it is more of an issue. Internal corporate titles mean little, unless you use it to go for an outside job you are not qualified for
no shade, computer programming is a lot more useful than learning how to be an actuary
It was a great skill, and it helped a lot in future jobs, but it made me useless as an actuary
maybe I was better off in the long run, but not if I didn’t get out of there soon enough
You kind of need to swallow your pride and get the experience, the sooner the better. There’s not really a shortcut to learning what you need to learn. I’ve seen some middle aged people trying to make up for it by overselling (aka lying) and seeing if they can scramble but that of course leads to problems. Usually bigger and bigger lies to buy more time to see if they can catch up.
Of course you’re not going to know everything and will have gaps no matter what. In these cases you have to hire specialists when you’re a manager and lead them appropriately. If your team doesn’t have a required skill set to get something done you need to be transparent about it.
People skills goddammit
1 Like
So you think it becomes more of an issue as an ASA? I am a student, probably a little over a year from ASA.
While it is unfair to say I learned nothing, most of my work was just ad hoc spreadsheet stuff involving no programming or real experience with actuarial software.
So you mean just accepting that you do not know what you should, and trying to catch up on skills.
I don’t agree. In my first actuarial job I sort of faced that tradeoff. Do I want to be a SAS data expert supporting the actuaries based on my previous skillset of working daily writing SAS code or do I want to really dive into being an actuary and understanding insurance analytics, business, etc. The latter is far more lucrative.
I’m guessing you’ll compare it to more legit programming but even then, being a well qualified, competent actuary is really lucrative.