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Was an actuary for 8 years, got my Associateship (roughly halfway through the progression to Fellow). Failed a few of the exams a couple of times, passed a few on the first try. At the time, each exam had a roughly 40-60% pass rate, so by the time you get to the 4th or 5th exam, you are dealing with a pretty smart, invested group...AND it is still difficult to pass. My job mainly consisted of statistics and data applied specifically to insurance, which I found very boring. I was in life insurance, which is quite simple (people only die once!). Health insurance would have been more interesting, but I am in favor of single payor, so this would have been difficult for me. Property & Casualty (vehicles, property, events, umbrella, custom, etc) would have been the most interesting. Once I decided to leave, I got an MBA (core courses were trivial due to actuarial knowledge of stats, finance, econ, accounting, etc), and ended up in Analytics/DataScience at tech companies, where my skills transferred quite well. |
I would hire anyone who has passed even a single SOA/CAS exam in a Data Science role in a heartbeat - likely above most other candidates. While I don't directly monitor the "State of the Actuaries", I would have expected the industry to better poise itself as the penultimate "Data Science" candidate-incubator and stretch beyond insurance. I haven't seen an actuarial program that didn't cover computing science as part of degree requirements - and in my case, I also met all degree requirements for BSc Statistics. I did see however the SOA added a predictive analytics exam, exercised in R language.... so that's a start.
/resists urge to bash the term "Data Science" as a Science... because it's really just a combination of {actuarial,stats,cs} which are real science disciplines.