Not doing PPD can get you kicked out of IFoA

Not doing PPD can get you kicked out of IFoA student membership or suspended from taking exams.
See the webinar from 34th minute onwards.

PPD should not be confused with CPD. You have to do both or could lose your membership. See from 59 minutes onwards.

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You can - as one would know if one has read the PPD guide, where the detail is in ink:
"There are specific penalties if students do not meet their annual requirements once their PPD deadline has passed: 1. Failure to complete the annual requirements will result in an incremental non-compliance fee of up to £200 to submit any additional logs once your deadline has passed. 2. If students continue to fail to meet their previous years PPD requirements 3 months after their initial PPD deadline has passed, then they risk being suspended from their examinations. 3. If after 12 months, or at the next passing of the PPD deadline students have not met the annual requirements for 2 years (24 months) then their IFoA student membership maybe revoked. Students who miss or cannot meet their PPD deadline must contact Education Services education.services@actuaries. org.uk at the soonest possible opportunity to discuss their situation."

Best to do it then.

 

How many times has this PPD guide been retrospectively modified? I can’t read it every day and compare to the last version (if I happen to have luckily saved it) to check for changes? I still don’t understand what I have to do for PPD. I’ve asked the IFOA 60 times and I’m not exaggerating. 60 times

 

I have just looked at the PPD guide. Last time I read it was a year ago. It has changed a lot from what I remember but still unclear what people have to do. Back then IFoA couldn't answer questions about it and closed discussion with me. Some of my queries were with regards to the 'career break' option. It's still not clear what this means. I understand students at Uni are allowed to log PPD as 'career break'. Presumably any self-employed/contractors too who aren't working on anything actuarial. Or maybe pregnant women. What's not clear is whether someone can log 3-years 'career break' and qualify as a Fellow? If not, then this scheme delays qualification times, as it doesn't accept pre-Sept 2017 work experience anymore- this is something I put to IFoA and they closed discussion as they didn't want to admit it.

I do ask what was so wrong with the work experience requirement, which pre-dated work-based skills? You simply had to fill in a form showing you did actuarial work for at least 3 years. No boring essays. No logging things every year. I believe it's another example of IFoA fixing a problem that didn't exist, unnecessary red tape.

 

almost_there: having only had a very brief look at the PPD requirements on line, it is clear to me that someone with a 3-year career break can't qualify as a Fellow unless they have submitted a minimum of 20 credits. If the PPD scheme was anything like the WBS scheme (which personally I thought was terrible), the IFoA will be looking more at whether the student has demonstrated that they have the necessary competencies to qualify, regardless of any career break that may or may not have been taken. It is disappointing that the literature doesn't fully address what happens if a career break is taken, but I would hope that the IFoA would be reasonable. In any case, the requirements are not onerous and even on a career break it may be possible to attend seminars or do on-line courses. Not that this should be an expectation, but in any case might be beneficial for someone returning from a break, speaking from experience.

 

Marzipan- it makes sense they'd still want the 20 credits yes. The issue is that PPD can't be done retrospectively. Work experience pre Sept 2017 won't be allowed. Older students taking a career break (& in my view far more likely to take a career break than younger students) won't be able to claim PPD for pre Sept 2017 work experience and so have their qualification delayed.

In my experience IFoA are not reasonable at all, are very strict on their policies no matter how unreasonable they are. I believe the reason they don't give straight answers sometimes is because they realise aspects of their system is unfair or even discriminatory and they don't want to admit so. In my case as I said they closed discussion despite promises on their website they would find a way to accommodate people through these changes. That promise in my case was clearly false.

It was a serious betrayal of older students to no longer let their work-based skills exemption carry through to PPD. The right and proper thing to do would be to have a kind of 'amnesty', rather than subject older students to a new system that would delay their qualification if they had a career break. It's plainly unfair to treat someone who joined before 2005 as having the same amount of valid actuarial work experience as someone who joined a year ago. However when older students with work-based skills exemptions and over 10 years work experience are asking IFoA to assess and sign off their work experience as it stands they are being stonewalled. This PPD system by Sept 2020 renders people's work experience pre Sept 2017 as worthless and this clearly disadvantages older students as well as frankly being insulting to these people who have worked in actuary for an awful long time when they've understood all along they only needed to demonstrate 3 years actuarial work experience. The 'competencies' IFoA claim they want to see demonstrated didn't start in Sept 2017; having this arbitrary date is preposterous.

Once again the promises by Derek Cribb of leaving no student disadvantaged with these changes turns out to be false and misleading. There didn't need to be a complicated transition period at all. They should have had an amnesty for those wbs exempt then let people convert their existing wbs into ppd credits and just move on. Once people have reached 20 credits I don't see what merit there is in having to keep recording this stuff. Why should some people become Fellows with 20 PPD credits and others have 50?

Pre Sept 2017 work-based skills is also worthless completely from Sept 2020. All that effort people have put in to record work-based skills gone to waste. There is no complaints process at IFoA to address any issues arising from these changes as IFoA describe it as 'policy' for which their so-called 'putting things right' complaints process doesn't deal with.

 

My best advice to new students joining the IFOA is to start gaining work experience 3 years prior to your expected day of passing your last exam to get an FIA. Best to do something meaningful with your life rather than gaining actuarial experience which is worthless without the exams. I don't know many people who pass all exams in 3 years.

 

It seems odd to me that you can have someone on an Uni course, such as the accredited 3-year ones where you can get exempt from CT series, can then graduate for argument's sake with CT series in the bag, join IFoA, work for 3 years and for argument's sake complete the remaining exams in 3 years, thus in total taking 6 years to complete the exams but only have to submit 3 years PPD, as the time Uni would simply be logged as 'career break' or not even need to do PPD at all if only joining IFoA at the point of graduating. Whereas someone who graduates without exemptions and starts the exams in the workplace and takes 6 years to pass all the exams would end up submitting 6 years worth of PPD. For 6 long years, those pursuing exams in the workplace are exposed to the sanctions for not completing PPD... I think it is very unfair that people must continue logging PPD after meeting the minimum 20 credits.

 

almost_there: it makes sense to me. My impression is that the intention of PPD is to bring student's original WBS requirements in line with a qualified member's CPD. Whilst at uni, the student is unlikely to be a member of the Institution, and if they are not working then it makes sense to categorise this as a 'career break' - indeed their 'career' hasn't yet begun. As they are not working or otherwise representing themselves to clients/customers as a member of the IFoA then there is no requirement for them to demonstrate professional competencies. If they were to then gain 20 credits and yet take another 3 or more years to qualify, over time these credits become of less worth. They demonstrated that the student was developing their professionalism in the years they were earned. They do not demonstrate that the student has upheld and continued to develop their professionalism in the more recent years. What constitutes "professionalism" changes over time as culture and attitudes change - it can be very subjective. As a customer I would want to know that people working as actuaries are "professional" in today's standards. Hence I believe it is right that PPD/CPD should be demonstrated throughout an actuary's career. The logistics of how it works and the finer detail is clearly still clunky, perhaps a slight improvement on WBS, and the transition between the two schemes is overly complex. Note that in your example, where a graduate with exemptions only has to submit 3 years of PPD they would then be required to submit CPD thereafter, which also imposes sanctions. Hence they are not any less exposed to sanctions than the graduate with no exemptions.

 

The PPD system does not allow for competencies pre Sept 2017 to be recorded. This is a major flaw. It is not a genuine conversion of previous systems into PPD credits for this reason. It is the imposition of a brand new system from Sept 2017 that disregards work experience competencies gained pre- Sept 2017 completely by Sept 2020. This is what's unfair to older students. By Sept 2020 it's only what's recorded from Sept 2017 in the form of PPD credits counts. Someone who started working in say 2010 could have worked full time until Sept 2017 in actuary with almost 8 years of competencies, have written all those WBS essays and they won't be able to get any credit as PPD. This is clearly unfair and absurd. IFoA should have allowed these people to convert their WBS/work experience into PPD credits. Then there would be no need for any transition period. The transition period is essentially rendering worthless people's pre-2017 Sept actuarial work experience towards Sept 2020.

It's only 3 years CPD and PPD compared to someone starting the exams in the workplace having to do 6 years CPD and PPD, so the latter are exposed to sanctions for double the length of time. My point is why should some get to qualify on just 20 PPD credits but others who reach this number aren't allowed to stop.

For what purpose exactly, so that IFoA have a new way to impose sanctions on members?

 

Also there is a cut off date in January 2019 and Form A experience would no longer be taken into account. Hence, the past experience is completely useless. Every change of system causes students to loose either exam passes or makes their experience void. Not a fair system.

 

I doubt such a system applies in European countries. In Denmark you are qualified without needing any work experience at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_credentialing_and_exams#Denmark

How do Danish actuaries then become Fellows of IFoA?
https://www.actuaries.org.uk/membership/mutual-recognition/actuarial-association-europe

They need 2 years work exp in EU then could pass a SA exam and become a IFoA Fellow, when everyone else needs 3 years work experience documented as PPD, a very particularised system that disregards pre-Sept 2017 work experience. For 2 years EU Work experience it seems IFoA only ask for a letter from an employer. No fear of sanctions from any PPD as don't have to do it. Also they are placed in CPD category 8 where there's nothing to do, so no chance of sanctions from that as well.

 

The transitional arrangements of WBS to PPD are something I struggle to understand. For example, is the period between 1 September 2017 and your joining anniversary, say 1 January 2018, count as an eligible PPD year? The PPD guide states that "A PPD year will run from the day and month you joined the IFoA for twelve months." , so this leads me to think the answer is yes.

I attended the webinar and I remember the answer to one of the questions being something about pro-rating the PPD credit requirements based on when you joined the Institute. For example, if you plan to qualify in December 2019 then that's 2 full years of PPD and 1 year of WBS. But what happens to that chunk from 1 September to 2017 to 1 January 2018.

What do other think about this? Am I missing something?

 

Good question Aladinsane. I'm afraid I don't know the answer. This is one of many reasonable questions the IFoA need to provide clarification on. I think as they are bringing in a system where there are sanctions for not complying then there is no excuse for them not to provide clarity. However they have failed to provide clarity. This is not good enough. Such a response is not professional or skilled and we shouldn't put up with it.

 

Aladinsane - my understanding is that Sep 17 - Jan 18 would then be under WBS (not PPD), and eligible to count towards the 3 years total work experience.