News & Views

With the changes to the IR35 rules now less than a month away, the landscape is beginning to look clearer but there is still plenty of work to be done to prepare. Our latest article on the topic gives an update on recent developments and looks ahead to how the market might look post-April.

Data science is an area that provides opportunities for actuaries to make good use of their skill sets, but up until now this has not been recognised explicitly in the actuarial curriculum. All that is set to change, and Chris Bryce interviews Colin Thores, Education Actuary at the IFoA, to find out more about the new Certificate in Data Science qualification.

Sunday 8 March marked International Women’s Day, which aims to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. As our own contribution to the occasion, two of APR’s female staff give their views on what it is to be a woman in the actuarial world today.

As you may have seen, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) are currently holding a consultation on changes to the CPD scheme for its members. But what will this mean in practice? In this article, Ross Gordon summarises the key changes being proposed and lets you know what to do if you want your opinion to be heard.

To help you keep on top of CPD opportunities over the coming weeks and months, Ross Gordon summarises some of the actuarial profession’s upcoming events and sessions. He has even drawn out those elusive Stage 3 Professional Skills sessions for those of us that need them.

We recently held our annual review and training days at APR and here we quickly recap the two days covering a few highlights from 2019, our plans for 2020 and then take a quick look at some of the training our staff undertook on the training day.

One very large part of actuarial modelling is the need to amend or update existing models. This presents a different set of challenges to building a model from scratch so in this article we lay out our top tips on what to do when inheriting coded actuarial models.

At APR our partners have over 50 years combined experience hiring and developing student actuaries. Recently two of our junior students, Claydon Peaker and Jack Miller, sat down to interview one of those partners, Gary Heslop, to get his views on what makes a good actuarial student. This article summarises their conversation.

Following another stellar set of exam results in December, our FIA study co-ordinator Adam Smith and his fellow student Deven Rickaby decided to take a more detailed look at the exam results, specifically to test if our exam results were anything more than good luck.

APR took on our first cohort of students for the Certified Actuarial Analyst role in September 2017. Having since qualified as a CAA and progressed onto the FIA exams one of this cohort, Morgan Smith-Woodhams, gives her views on the qualification itself and its merits as an alternative route into the actuarial profession.