Computer Languages that I should know?

Hello.
I have cleared CT1, CT3 and CT7.
I gave CT2 and CT6 in this exam diet.

I was researching about various softwares/computer languages used by actuaries. Got to know about SAS and R.

I would like to know whether learning these languages before I start looking for a job would be helpful?

If yes, where can I get any tutorials regarding these subjects in India?

Currently I'm studying in a college for Bachelors in Statistics degree.

I have a good one month vacation before my college starts again.

Is it possible for a college going student like me, with zero experience, to learn these languages or are there any special set of skills I need to acquire before I learn them?

I have learnt C++ and Visual Basic while I was in my junior college.

And lastly, will these languages help me edge out in the job market?

 

I work in a job that involves coding in multiple platforms and languages, so I'm guessing I have dubious qualifications to comment on your situation :-

1) Companies don't expect you to know SAS if you are a fresher. SAS is an expensive tool to buy/learn and is expected to be learned on the job.

2) Since you already know VB, R or MATLAB is your best bet to begin with. SAS has an IML package that is very similar to these languages - so transition to SAS will be easier. I do a lot of my SAS work in IML (except for data extraction and pre-processing, for which I use SAS-SQL).

3) It is possible for someone with zero experience to self-learn these packages. That's how I did it.

4) No particular platform will place you at an advantage, since each company differs in the tools it uses. What people look at is the ability to adapt to new programming languages with ease.

5) Actuarial work will be very IT oriented faster than you think, if it isn't already. Without programming skills, you will be an actuarial dinosaur.

 

Are there any tutorials which I could join or may be some online tutorials to learn R or MATLAB or both?

 

To be honest, a lot of this depends on what kind of job you have in mind. My instinctive reaction to your question is that you might be better off focusing on Excel and Access with VBA. Excel in particular is ubiquitous within actuarial teams and the ability to automate tasks with VBA is very helpful. I would tend to say that speed and fluency in Excel is more important than learning to use lots of obscure functions, but do get to grips with:

• SUMIF and SUMIFS functions
• INDIRECT
• OFFSET
• VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP
• INDEX and MATCH
• Use of CTRL+\ and CTRL+SHIFT+\ for finding inconsistent formulae
• Use of CTRL+[ for finding referenced cells
• Use of CTRL+G and then click on "Special" - used for finding e.g. blank cells, cells containing values but not formulae, etc.
• Use of the "Edit Links" button on the Data tab of the ribbon

Access is less widely-used, but it is still helpful and a lot of the concepts you would learn this way would carry over naturally to SAS or SQL Server if you ever needed to learn these. Concentrate on tables, including defining relationships between them, and queries, including SQL statements, rather than forms and reports. It may be worth looking at how VBA works in the context of Access as well.

I would tend to say that R is a bit more specialist. Within general insurance, where I work, its use is not widespread and tends to be limited to ancillary tasks, e.g. drawing unusual graphs that Excel cannot easily handle. The one notable exception is Lloyds, whose Internal Model is written in R.

So my priority list would be:

• Excel
• Excel VBA
• Access
• Access VBA
• Maybe a little bit of R

Hope that helps.

 

I agree with the dominance of Excel and the value of having a decent grasp of it. That said, at the same time, it is such a quirky tool that I wouldn't expect any person new to the work environment to know it inside out (and some of the things on td290's list are new to me, for what it's worth).

I agree that specific languages are less important than generic skills; R is probably going to become more and more common as more and more graduates enter the workforce with it and frankly the more it replaces Excel the better in my opinion.

Beyond that, my personal suggestion would be to work through a text on fundamental computer science - http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html would be my choice but there are plenty choices out there.