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From the President
Educating Actuaries for the Future
by Robert F. Conger
A bright young actuary I know recently remarked that some of us more senior actuaries can be pretty dangerous when we start poking around inside a spreadsheet. My colleague even joked that I should be issued a computer-operating license with specific restrictions—just like a senior citizen might have driver's license restrictions. At least I think it was a joke....
Joking or not, there's a legitimate point here. During the time I was pursuing my Fellowship, most insurance company computers were accessed through clumsy and expensive timeshare arrangements; computer instructions were written, line-by-line, in painstaking languages (the instructions were appropriately designated as "code"); and most calculators sported four functions. The first desktop computers and primitive spreadsheet programs were just gaining a toehold in the marketplace. Imagine, for a moment, that I worked tremendously hard in the early years of my career to learn all the ins-and-outs of FORTRAN programming on a timeshare computer, but only invested a couple of hours a year thereafter keeping up with the technology and tools. How effectively would I be using my laptop computer today? I probably would be better off if I had spent a little less time learning a fixed initial base of technology and more time learning the evolving technology over the years.
It's not too much of a stretch to extend this analogy to our actuarial knowledge. So much has changed in a generation! Policyholders face new sources of loss and liability (Internet liability and employment practices liability as well as the dangers of using cell phones while driving). Mass torts, class action cases, and catastrophic natural or man-made events now loom large as we think about the total cost of the insurance system. New sources of information, and new ways of linking disparate sources of information, allow greater insights into the system cost-drivers, risk classification, and underwriting. Risk management used to mean, "I buy our company's insurance"; today's risk manager may be considering all the interrelated factors that could affect the company's ability to meet its business goals. Corporate lines have blurred as banks and insurance companies play in each other's arenas. The world has become our marketplace and we experiment with different models for the "manufacturing," distribution, and servicing of the insurance product. And, of course, the impressive technological power and vast array of information that is, literally, at our fingertips allows today's actuary to employ very different methods of analyzing, modeling, forecasting, simulating, computing, and communicating.
None of us is sufficiently prescient to know how a future CAS president might write the foregoing paragraph in the year 2025. (As in the film, Frequency, it sure would be helpful to have that future generation of actuaries sending radio messages back through the decades, "Psst! Buy stock in Yahoo.") It's a safe bet the columnist in that distant place and time will not be musing, "Gosh! Nothing has changed in the past generation!" How, then, are we to prepare today's new actuary for the journey into the future?
It seems to me the answer to this question is neatly linked with another challenge that we have been facing in recent years: the growth in the volume and complexity of material on our Syllabus of Examinations.
Perhaps we have erred on the side of packing our Syllabus as though preparing the new Fellow for a space launch—a space launch in which all supplies and materials must be on board at the beginning of the journey even though we don't know what strange environments and new civilizations will be encountered. A better model would be analogous to supplying the needs of a mid-19th century pioneer family as they push off from St. Louis for a trip into the unknown, carrying only the contents of a primitive wagon, but prepared (nay, required) to spend every day learning from and adapting to the new and changing environment.
What then are the implications of this metaphor for the future direction of the CAS education processes? First, exercise self-discipline in loading only the most important "supplies" into our basic education syllabus. We hear from today's students that their wagons are creaking under the current load; maybe we can do without some of the anvils and crates of encyclopedias we've packed in various corners of the wagon. But let's be sure to include plenty of materials that will help our future actuaries learn, adapt, and build the tools they need in the future. Second, continue and expand our organizational emphasis on offering a wide array of continuing education opportunities, using both traditional and new delivery and media techniques to cover an ever-growing array of subject matter. Where it doesn't make sense for the CAS itself to develop an offering in a certain area, collaborate with other organizations to help our members access the learning they need. Either way, the objective is to help our members learn from and adapt to the changing business environment around them. Third, in order to assure our employers and clients that their actuaries are prepared for the future environments, we should significantly expand the continuing education requirements that apply to each member, but allow considerable flexibility for each member to customize their continuing education to best fit their personal current and future job requirements and challenges.
The 1970's syllabi anticipated none of the specific changes of the past quarter century, yet my CAS education as a whole, by including a large dose of continuing education, has prepared me very effectively for a great many of the changes. Let's make sure we are doing the same for the future generations!