It should be expected that exam success will lead to better pay, and perhaps a better chance of getting a job, but it is not always the case that exam success is the only criteria with which you will be judged by.
Career progress vs respect for your skills vs exams passed depends on what you're doing.
I work in a company where several heads / team leads are not Fellows, yet they are highly regarded and often lead a team that contains Fellows.
It's probably easier to justify favouring a person who's passed all the exams over someone who hasn't due to the nature of our profession. However, if someone's really good at their work, then in my experience, they get recognised for their behaviour/attitude/performance, irrespective of the number of exams that they've passed.
I would have thought that what I've written above was obvious.
Someone's mentioned Andrew Smith recently, so I'm going to use him as a shining example of someone who's done very well in the actuarial profession without having as much success in the exams as you might expect.
.....and I've not really heard people placing much emphasis on how long it actually took someone to do the exams. Usually it's "are you qualified?" or "how many exams do you have left?" - it's not often that I've heard someone say "Oh, errr, OK, so errr, how long have you been struggling with them then?"
Perhaps you're mixing with the wrong crowd.
Perhaps your peer group is feeding your negativity towards the profession.
Perhaps you've been very unlucky with your dealings with hiring managers.
Based on your last 20 or so comments - perhaps you need a change.
Last edited by a moderator: Nov 7, 2013