How often has one come across this profession? 9 out of 10 people who have heard about it say it is “something to do with insurance”. And it stops there.

While the work of an actuary involving assessment of the cost associated with an insurance or a pension promise continues to be essential, their skills extend far beyond this narrow scope. Actuarial skills are built on putting a value on long-term uncertainty, and the country would benefit from putting this expertise to work in far more places than it currently does.

So what are some of the non-traditional areas that actuaries are working in today?

Let us look at how Frank Chang, Past President of Casualty Actuarial Society and current Vice President of Applied Science at Uber,uses data science in his job. This clearly is a non-traditional area. Frank says, “Actuaries have a lot more techniques for dealing with thin data, whereas the vast majority of data scientists are content to rely solely on p-value and power analyses. We are a lot more careful when jumping to conclusions, take in more business context, and are trained in finance and accounting, so we can better translate results into business and financial impact.”

This is echoed by Nalen Naidoo, CEO of Property24 and current President of Actuarial Society of South Africa.“My job is to keep a large digital marketplace valued, trusted, and commercially successful. This requires breaking complex pricing decisions into assumptions, drivers, and scenarios and distinguishing signal from noise in large volumes of consumer behaviour data. Actuaries are trained to think logically through problems, to develop and act on feedback loops, to consider multiple stakeholders in decisions, and to transparently exercise professional judgement”

Actuaries are one of the oldest data scientists in the world. Actuaries are trained to take a long-term view on the models and ask whether it is fair, explicable, and stable over decades, and not just focus on their near-term prediction abilities. Actuarial training helps develop and refine the core skills of quantifying uncertainty and long-term risks. This would transfer to several domains that help businesses understand the financial consequences of their decisions using........

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