News & Views
How I made a career change to become an actuary
In this article Tom Coyne shares his experience of, and tips for, making a career change to become an actuary.
Making Good Students Great, Again
As APR prepares for its largest ever single intake of staff in September 2021, our induction manager Chris Nash reflects further on the key skills and traits which we aim to instil in our staff from their first day in the office.
Mental Health First Aid Training
Having recently attended a training course to become a mental health first aider, Mohassin Shah reflects on what he learnt and the benefits this training can bring to APR.
The Golden Rules of Good Documentation
Following on from our previous article on setting up a template in Microsoft Word, James Nicholl explores what makes a good piece of actuarial documentation and sets out six golden rules to follow when producing documents.
Microsoft Word – Use and Abuse
Having poor quality documentation will ensure endless problems for most organisations. In this article John Bennett guides us how to ensure that we have poor quality documentation.
Resource Management at APR – balancing supply and demand
Balancing the supply and demand of APR’s actuarial team has been one of our biggest challenges in the past couple of years. In this article, Gary Heslop discusses the resource management challenges APR faces and the approaches we take to mitigate these risks.
Excel’s LAMBDA Function and Turing Completeness
Microsoft Excel is widely used throughout the industry for a wide variety of different purposes. In this article, Jack Foley takes a look at the introduction of the new LAMBDA function in Excel which allows the user to define their own Excel functions.
Open-Source Licensing
Open-source software is powering more commercial business than ever. In this article Joseph Barnett introduces open-source and why people and businesses might embrace it. He also gives an overview of some of the principles and variations involved when using and producing open-source software especially within an actuarial context.
APR Charity Challenge
In February, APR staff competed in teams to run, walk, or otherwise exercise their way almost 1,000 miles as part of APR’s Charity Challenge, all while raising some much needed funds for the Trussell Trust.
Choosing the Right Tool
Model run-times in actuarial work are heavily dependent on what tool has been chosen to perform the calculations. In this article Phil Creswell summarises a model optimisation project that APR’s Technology Team has recently carried out, highlighting the dramatic differences in run-times and the benefits of engaging APR on a consultancy basis.