Are you wondering what you can do after getting an actuary education? If you are interested in being an actuary, you need to get a degree first and pass a series of examinations. After that, you would be in for a treat as you take on one of the well-paid jobs in the world with enough challenge to help you last through it for years to come.
To be a good actuary, you also need to analyze things in order to predict the future. The future does not offer any sense of certainty and there are even risks that are associated with it. It is the role of an actuary to develop a notion of what these risks are and what might happen if the negative things you might have seen during your analysis would come true.
Areas of Specialty
An actuary is expected to be good at the following things:
• Developing how future scenarios might unfold;
• Formulating ways on how to minimize the risks in case negative events would happen;
• And reducing the undesirable impact of the negative happenings you have seen during your analysis.
Skills
To be good at your job, you don’t only need to go to school and get a degree. You also need the right skills for you to prepare on how to become an actuary. Actuaries have to be logical, practical, and analytical. They need good analytical skills, broad knowledge of business operations, and practical knowledge of people’s problem solving behavior. These are the skills that can help them reduce risks.
Importance of an Actuary
An actuary has an important role in society because of the raised value of insurance today. People often take insurance for granted, but the current laws and regulations as well as the increased awareness of the cost of having an uninsured future have made insurance policies more valuable investment for more people. For instance, a car owner would be less than willing to drive an uninsured car knowing how costly it would be to repair or replace. A tourist would not travel the world so easily without having a plan on how to take care of himself when he falls ill during the trip. A house owner would not be at ease knowing how expensive it would be if the house gets struck by a calamity or accident. The importance of insurance gives assurance to the policy holders and it has shown increasingly tangible effects on the lives of people.
What Actuaries Do
An actuary’s job is always to deal with risk and manage it well. It is your duty to assist the client in enjoying more financial benefits without shouldering a lot of risks. Actuaries can do any of the following things:
• Minimizing risks. In the case that involves events which are linked to one another, there is a possibility that as one benefits, the other might be put at a disadvantage. For a client’s portfolio, you need to find two items with opposite reactions to a specific situation. This is done to diversify a portfolio and reduce the risk. For instance, you can invest in cars and used tires since as income goes up, you would sell a lot of cars but when income goes down, you will likely sell a lot of used tires.
• Benefiting at the expense of others. This depends greatly on which side you have chosen. For instance, a ban for locals from touring in certain international destinations might be bad for other countries’ tourism industry, but this will prove good for local tourist destinations.
• Concentrating on minimizing the major risk. Although you may take on a major problem, it does not mean equally huge solutions too. Small steps will do.
