Hi all - I am a trainee actuary involved in financial reporting work for a life company. In the future I`d love to be able to work for myself and preferably from home (i.e a very big house in the country ). I am not afraid of working hard, but I don`t like city life or commuting! Does anybody know of any actuaries who have created their own small companies? If so what kind of services do they offer? Any advice much appreciated,
Creating your own small company doesn't necessarily imply working from home - almost all contractors will have their own company for example, but most work from client offices the majority of the time. Working from home was very common indeed during the pensions mis-selling review 5-10 years back, and to a lesser extent during the endowment review. Companies like Hazell Carr were distributing pensions review calcs to hundreds of self-employed actuaries/students working from home, all of whom were paid by the case so could determine their own working hours, days, etc and take on staff if they saw fit. Some of these small companies actually got very large very quickly. Understand that with the end of the pension review and the large reduction in endowment mis-selling complaints this business model doesn't really exist any more (certainly not on that scale). Something similar could well come up again in the future though. In the current market I'd say there are more opportunities for qualified actuaries than students to work at home. Jobs such as exam marking, training, expert witness work, ad-hoc calculations, general consulting, etc can typically be done mostly from home. Think this is how the likes of OAC operate, allocating work on a piecemeal basis to a network of self-employed actuaries. There are other options to redress the work-life balance if you don't like the commute. Plenty of employers are happy to allow one day a week or more working from home. Alternatively you could shift to a 4-day week. At the moment, typically the more senior the role the greater the say in work patterns. Strangely, contractors often seem to get greater flexibility than perm staff at the moment - I know plenty who do one or more days from home. I think we'll start to see this flexibility roll out a bit more widely in the future though as office cultures change, IT functionality improves and telecommuting becomes more widely accepted.
Cool Zebedee, thanks for that. I have no intention of working from home at the minute as I havent finished the exams or got enough experience.
