[gompertz]

Congratulations from someone who has passed three of the exams, and then bailed.

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.