Actuarial Jobs

You may never have heard of an actuarial job, but the chances are that at some point in your life you have benefited from the work of these clever people who are most often employed in the insurance trade.

If you have ever been involved in a car accident, lost possessions in a house fire or suffered a holiday injury needing expensive medical care, you would expect to have been compensated by insurance cover. The amount paid to you would have been calculated from data provided by actuaries working for your insurance company, whose job is to evaluate risk and, where possible, manage it.

An actuarial job is intellectually stimulating and often very well paid, so much so that the profession has been rated as one of the top five jobs available. If this is a field that appeals to you, you will need to be good at mathematics and statistics and possess an analytical mind that can detect trends and patterns from a set of figures.

You’ll need a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, statistics, economics or another finance related subject to enter the field. Your first job will most likely be an internship that will familiarize you with how an insurance company works. After this you would be able to choose a specialized field, such as health, life, property or casualty, or even financial planning and investment. Risk is involved in all these areas, and your work in an actuarial job would be to manage and assess it, fixing the premiums that people need to pay for insurance protection.

Most actuaries work in the insurance industry, but there are opportunities in all sections of the economy, particularly in the financial services field. The rewards for the years of training you would be committing to if you decide to become an actuary are high – senior members of the profession earn between $150,000 and $250,000 a year.