Rant on obsolete techniques

I work at a large P&C insurance company and I have my FCAS. From my experience, I felt like my 7 or so years working in various “traditional” actuarial roles (eg ratemaking and reserving) were incredibly boring.

From my experience, you can’t use any of the advanced techniques you learn from the exams because certain assumptions fail in reality plus execs don’t want to see fancy things that are difficult to explain. In reserving for example, we’d often tweak the method we’d use just to get to a number we thought was “good” solely because it told a reasonable story and not because it’s our true opinion on accuracy. And of course since we’re in excel there’s no ability to actually dive deeper into the granular data. It’s just anecdotal things we hear from the claims org that inform us what the “story” should be.

All the while, data scientists are building models that are blowing our actuarial methods out of the water and we just sit there twiddling our thumbs.

I have a hard time understanding why so many brilliant people I know who become actuaries are completely fine with the job itself. It’s like they get burnt out from the exams and just accept that the work is like this without critically asking themselves if these techniques are obsolete.

Sorry for ranting but sometimes I get frustrated when I realize the exams were truly just a way to weed people out and now I’m at the end I realize it’s not even a job that’s exciting (mathematically/technically speaking).

Please don’t get me wrong though, I know actuaries have a place in insurance companies and they bring a lot of domain knowledge to the table and that’s very important. But despite all the work the CAS does to improve the exam process, I just can’t help but feel we’re still decades behind the current tech that exists.