actuarial developer role

there are many actuarial developer role advertised at recruiter website. most of these require programming skills and knowledge of profit or moses modeling tool. profit and moses modeling skill can be only acquired through experience working at a firm or an insurance company as I have gathered from surfing web. how do actuaries with development skills with no profit or moses experience fare for such role. how difficult is to learn actuarial software if you have IT and development skills? are there any courses on actuarial software? or are there demo trial installations available? are there any online course, a book, or a tutorial. do employers look for specific profit moses development skill or do IT professional with actuarial qualification stand a chance?

 

We live in a really stupid country, where firms want people already trained to do things yet they all are reluctant to train people themselves.

Even if you go on a course to learn Prophet or Moses coding, you'll struggle to get a job as they want you to have used it in a 'commercial setting'.

Some firms are reluctant to train their in-house staff in Prophet or MoSes unless they think they are gonna hang around for 20 years, as they're scared people will leave and cash in on those skills elsewhere.

 

Some companies even promise to their actuarial students they will move them onto Prophet or MoSes work... but don't fulfill their promises. Those unfortunate students end up spending years doing dead-end work of only internal use.

 

Fixed.

 

To some extent true...many companies these days are not very keen on training people, more so when the hires are lateral

 

Appreciated.

 

It's worth asking why Prophet or MoSes coding is not part of the actuarial qualification?

Also, do these companies think that actuarial students are too stupid to pick up some coding rather quickly? Not exactly difficult working with code.

 

To be fair, I don't think that this is the fault of the companies. Governments have made it very expensive to hire people, and also very expensive to fire people, through the continual addition of "workers rights" into law.

If it's going to cost you a lot to take someone on, and then even more to get rid of them if they turn out to be hopeless, then you would also want to make sure you got someone who was already proven to be good at the job with experience, etc.

Gone are the days where an employer could "take a punt" on someone at a low salary and train them up, which is a shame for all those out there with limited qualifications and experience.

 

I agree with that but the beneficiaries of these additional costs are not the employees. I bet if you traced starting salaries of actuarial students over time that it would not have kept up with inflation.

I would also argue that firms have brought unnecessary costs onto themselves with their ill-founded faith in HR professionals and recruitment agents, who seem to be involved more and more in decisions to hire actuaries when frankly they know nothing about the job.

 

Actually, the Institute was one of the first professional organisations to require coding knowledge as part of the exams. That was in the 1960s.

The reason it isn't examined is exactly that: it's not difficult (nor is it core actuarial knowledge).

(From a 1969 paper: "I think that it will be as essential in the future for an actuary to understand an elementary program of the sort we have described as it is at present for him to be able to use a slide rule."!)

 

... which begs the question why do employers think it's that difficult and are denying people jobs in it, when frankly just a week or two of intense attention to it is all that's required for supposed educated and numerate people!

 

I'm not sure about insurance because I've never worked in it, but in analytics, companies do not usually expect you to have superior SAS or MATLAB or R skills...especially if you are a beginner. Instead they expect you to be versed in at least one programming language from which you can build on. I always assumed that was the case in insurance too. Funny it isn't so.

 

A long time ago an actuarial manager told me that Prophet or MoSes are really just posh spreadsheets.

Nowadays there's an obsession about whether you've done the exact task previously. I blame HR influence on this way of thinking. They can't seem to grasp that an intelligent person who can code well in Excel VBA or C++ say can't pick up Prophet or MoSes without much fuss or time.

I would argue that qualifications in academia or actuary exams don't just show that you could do JUST THOSE things back then but that you have shown you can pick up new things and succeed. Modern HR thinking finds my thinking completely alien. They project their own inadequacies onto others.

 

It is also about the mindset of hirers. Companies do not want people 'who have not already seen things', and do not want them to learn on the job, unless of course they are at freshwer level(<=2 yrs experience). For middle level, who generally drive things hands on, they insist too much on complete job to skill match.

 

I consider the HR profession as lowly as I regard politicians or estate agents...

Sadly people's CV's go through their filtering before even reaching an actuary.

Some people undoubtedly lie they've done loads of Prophet or MoSes even if in reality they've only performed limited tasks on these software.

 

Indeed. I was at a talent analytics conference today and there was a mention of how a large process based company was able to reduce poor hires by 36% and save $4m just by by-passing the HR filtering stage. I don't have to mention how much worse the state of affairs is for work where creativity is involved.

 

thanks for the comments.
analytics is an interesting career for technically aware actuarial associates and there are many avenues open once acquired the required experience. to top with lack of actuarial software skill there also doesn't exist any extended insurance experience on my resume. exams were passed working in bank and asset management not on a training scheme. so probably for me get into actuarial technology I should look into an area of analytics such as sas programming or c++ development in noninsurance financial services and then possibly move toward an actuarial developer role which of course shouldn't be a problem as learning interface and environment is not usually a hard job as coding skill in the base programming language. proficiency in a technology with hard programming experience should be sufficient to get one through to a different platform with a different interface and programming and library structure.