An Overview of our Training Services and Actuarial Bootcamp
Over the past two years, APR has provided training services to the actuarial staff of nine clients across the Life and GI sectors, primarily in the core technical areas of Excel and VBA. This has not come about through active marketing on our part; rather it stems from client demand, which has arisen because clients can see the level of expertise the staff that we place with them hold in these core areas.
While there are large numbers of providers offering training in these applications, the key advantages of APR’s offering are:
- The ability to tailor our material to tools and models typically seen in actuarial work. For example, our Introductory VBA course challenges attendees to develop a two-way sensitivity analysis, a cashflow projection model and a stochastic maturity guarantee model.
- Proven quality. We make use of the material we have been using for over ten years to train and develop our own actuarial employees.
- An appropriate learning curve for actuarial staff. While that overall means a faster pace than in a typical course, we pride ourselves on producing very hands-on material that is clear, explains why, rather than just how, and aims to leave no attendee behind.
We are great advocates of the value gained by employers through continuing to invest in the technical skills of staff. In addition to the obvious increases in productivity that the right training can deliver, we firmly believe that ongoing technical development is key to retention of the best staff. This is exactly the approach we take with our own employed actuarial team.
We have been working on developing our training material in new areas, focusing on those skills we are increasingly seeing our clients looking to supplement through our core service of interim support. Good examples include:
- SQL, driven by the increasing use of data repositories in actuarial environments and the subsequent scope for actuarial users to be able to define their precise data needs, then extract and interrogate from large, complex data structures.
- R, driven by the increasing use of the software within actuarial teams to manage data flow, perform data analysis and advanced analytics, and allow ready visualisation of key metrics.
It is our intention to run public training courses in Excel modelling, VBA, SQL and R during the final quarter of 2018, and if needed, the early part of 2019. We’d be pleased to offer a free training place on each of these courses to one member of staff from any existing or prospective clients.
The courses will take place in London and, subject to demand, Edinburgh. If you are interested in taking up such an offer, please get in touch with gary.heslop@aprllp.com , who will provide further information on dates, more details of course content and client testimonials.
Our Actuarial Bootcamp runs each September, alongside our intensive period of training for our own new actuarial recruits. This year, reflecting the fact that general client demand is leading us to recruit a further, “mid-year”, intake of staff, we will also be running a bootcamp from January 2019.
The bootcamp is founded on the premise, reinforced both by our experiences over many years and client feedback, that a relatively short-term, intensive investment in the right training for new actuarial recruits can make a great difference to productivity and quality of work in the office.
Over typically a 2 to 4-week period, our bootcamp aims to develop a set of techniques, behaviours and skills that make (typically) new graduates effective members of an actuarial team. Further details of our Actuarial Bootcamp scheme are provided here – if you would be interested in finding out more about content or pricing please contact gary.heslop@aprllp.com .
For more information about our training services see https://aprllp.com/apr-client-solutions/training-services/.
Gary Heslop
September 2018
