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It's a risky business...
Close your eyes and think of a job involving risks. Bet you were thinking about Formula One drivers, stuntmen, miners, fishermen and human cannon balls, weren’t you? Did an actuary ever cross your mind? What do you mean, what’s an actuary? Oh sorry, yes, you can open your eyes now.
 Actuaries are those who work in insurance, pensions and investments – they’re the ones who have a knack with numbers and statistics and can apply them to businesses, and also decide what people need to pay to insure their cars, houses or much-loved pet dogs.
‘Challenging...'
...that’s how Charlotte Hurdle, a nearly qualified actuary, describes her job. She works for PricewaterhouseCoopers and calculates how much money people's pensions are worth and then talks to companies about the amount they need to pay for them.
Whilst at school Charlotte knew that she wanted to work with numbers because she enjoyed maths and got good marks in it, but didn't know what kinds of jobs were out there. With GCSEs in Maths, English, Science, French, Geography, Business studies, ICT and Drama and A-levels in Maths, Economics and Psychology, she went to the University of Exeter to study for a degree in Economics and Finance. It was a lecturer at university that suggested Charlotte consider becoming an actuary, so she tried it out by getting a summer job (internship) at an actuarial company during her final year, and that was it. She knew she had found her ideal career.
Charlotte uses many skills in her job. She takes risks and makes decisions. Being an actuary means you have to forecast what might happen in the future, based on the information available right now. For example, if you are paying a pension to someone until they die, you don't know if they might die tomorrow or in ten years time. So there’s no way of knowing how much money you’ll end up paying that person. But by using information on how people's life expectancies have been changing over the years, it’s possible to come up with a pretty accurate guess.
 Actuaries do a lot of problem-solving too. They deal with lots of calculated numbers and it’s important that they understand what these numbers mean before they give them to a client. If a number turns out to be different to what they’d expect then they need to investigate why. Either the number’s completely wrong or there’s something happening in the pension scheme that Charlotte and her colleagues need to talk to their clients about.
As in most jobs, actuaries also often work in teams, have meetings, make phone calls or write reports for clients. They need to communicate well using all these methods and explain things in a way that everyone can understand...
‘...but I think the most important skill needed in the world of work, if it counts as a skill, is enthusiasm,’ says Charlotte. ‘Enjoying your job and caring about whether you get it right goes a long way. I'll never forget the buzz I got the first time I saw a number I had calculated in the press.’
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