Training Services

“In vain have you acquired knowledge if you have not imparted it to others.” – Deuteronomy Rabbah

APR’s training services are founded on a very simple premise.  We have become renowned for the quality of the training we give to our own staff, and our clients frequently tell us how impressed they are with the level of knowledge and ability of APR people compared with others at a similar level.  So rather than keep this to ourselves we realised that we could help clients to improve their own skill base.

Our training services

“Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.” – Louis L’Amour

Technical training

We are able to offer group training courses, either on clients’ premises or at our own offices in central London.   We also periodically hold open training sessions at our offices, where we invite clients to send a delegate to sample the quality of the training we can deliver (at the same time, of course, as developing their own skills).

Clients find most value from our courses focused on core IT and technical skills, such as:

• Excel
• Access / SQL
• VBA
• R

However, we have also developed bespoke courses for clients on wider areas of interest, for example foundation courses in model office software.  As well as this, APR hosts workshops designed to demonstrate key actuarial concepts with the help of in-house capital and pricing models, such as our Solvency II balance sheet model which discusses the Solvency II framework and methodologies.

A document outlining the content of our Excel, Introductory / Intermediate VBA, Access, and SQL courses can be downloaded here.

Actuarial boot camp

APR’s Actuarial Bootcamp is an intensive course offering our clients the chance to get their new graduate joiners up to speed with key actuarial skills and concepts, in much the same way as we do with own new graduate recruits.  Typically run in September each year, the two-to four-week camp is split into modules so can be tailored to fit your individual needs.  Its aim is very simple – to reduce the amount of hand-holding and management time that new actuarial staff need to take up, and to provide such staff with a set of skills, knowledge and common techniques to make them more useful in their job.

Over the course of the Bootcamp, attendees will get the chance to work with various members of the APR actuarial team, each with their own experiences and expertise to share.  As well as covering our usual core technical material (Excel, VBA, Access), the camp also includes modules on knowledge-based topics such as products and regulation, and common actuarial methods such as profit testing, economic capital and valuations.  As with all of our training services, there is a strong focus on honing good actuarial practice from rigorous and transparent model design to the critical importance of sense checks, parameter sensitivity and good documentation.

Further details about APR’s Actuarial Bootcamp are given here – please contact us if you would like any more information.

Why use APR?

“Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.” – Plato

APR has a wealth of experience in offering actuarial solutions across the full range of life and pensions functions.  Our training material has been developed on the back of this experience for the purpose of giving our staff the skills and techniques they require to add value on their client projects.

All training courses are delivered by APR staff who, given our line of work, know the importance of designing flexible and efficient models that are clearly presented and well documented.  As such, our material is geared towards encouraging “best practices” to ensure that attendees can make the most effective use of the skills they take away with them.  Furthermore, our material includes practice exercises based on real-world actuarial scenarios that our team has faced while on client projects.

So while there are plenty of high-quality providers of training, by selecting APR you can be assured that the training is geared specifically at actuarial delegates, and delivered by trainers who know how the knowledge they impart is used in a practical context.

Contact us now if you are interested in learning more about any of our training services.