Since its inception in 2006 APR has had the good fortune to have recruited and worked with many truly exceptional people, who have given great value to our clients and helped our business to thrive.
Whichever route they join us by, APR staff have in common outstanding technical ability, strong business sense, a motivation to succeed within the actuarial profession and a desire to make the most of the opportunities the actuarial world has to offer.
Our staff appreciate the combination of a relaxed, friendly and informal culture, with a strong drive to deliver something innovative and valuable to our clients; all of our recruits enjoy the opportunities for early responsibility within a company structure which, despite our significant growth over the last few years, has remained refreshingly flat.
Regardless of your level of experience when you enter the business, your actuarial career with APR will consist of three main elements:
Training and study
APR is committed to providing excellent training for its staff. For those joining at graduate or school-leaver level, your time at APR starts with an intensive initial training period, where you will cover the skills most commonly required by our clients: advanced training with Excel and Access; key financial modelling software using in-house Prophet and Mo.Net licences; specialist commercial knowledge; programming courses including VBA, SQL and R. We know what differentiates the best actuarial students from the crowd, and we use this to develop our people’s technical and communication skills, as well as their wider industry knowledge.
It is in our best interests for our staff to qualify as quickly as possible, whether for the FIA or the CAA qualification, and to achieve this we provide a comprehensive package of study support. This includes a generous allowance of study days, the cost of study materials, marking and tutorials, exam fees and subscriptions to professional bodies. Coupled with our commitment to recruiting the brightest and best people, this is the reason our exam pass rate is significantly higher than the national average.
Once qualified, and for those joining us in more senior roles, we will map out a development pathway, aligning your professional interests with APR’s business needs and supported by our ongoing training allowance and library of technical material. Our aim is to develop our staff, including those taken on at entry-level roles, into subject area experts and senior leaders of the business, and as we have grown we have been increasingly successful in doing so.
Client projects
As an APR associate or analyst, you’ll have the opportunity to work on client projects around the UK and even beyond. The variety of roles you will be able to undertake, the level of responsibility even from an early stage in your APR career, and immediate exposure to client-facing work make us stand out from other actuarial employers. You could be representing APR at a client site within a month of starting, so confidence in communication and being a quick learner are a must. That said, any required training will be provided beforehand, as well as ongoing technical support, so we're confident you well be well-prepared to thrive in this environment.
Developing the business
The vast majority of our actuarial employees’ time is spent on client projects. In between projects, you will be carrying out a range of diverse and interesting roles at APR offices.
- Firstly, you will be improving your technical skills and knowledge by working through the APR bespoke development courses. Our associates and analysts complete advanced courses in a variety of software packages and programming languages to ensure they are well equipped to be effective on client projects.
- Another major role staff will perform is adding to APR’s technical expertise. This could involve creating technical exercises and models to support people in their client projects, giving you the opportunity for deep research into areas of interest in order to produce high quality resources.
- Finally, as a relatively small company, APR can offer its employees significant responsibility that actuarial students are unlikely to get elsewhere. This could include being a mentor for a junior colleague, delivering training, recruiting new staff, meeting with potential new clients, developing new propositions or getting involved in a range of central areas of the business. Increasingly, our more senior staff who wish to have the ability to split their time between client projects and central management functions, enabling them to develop valuable leadership skills.
Currently available roles
If you think you have the ability and personality to join our growing team, follow the links below to find out what roles are currently available. These in turn provide links to profiles of existing APR staff, and to application pages. Note that although we have specific intake points for graduate recruitment (normally September and February), we are always interested in taking on high-quality people, so feel free to get in touch with us for a chat, or apply via the pages listed, at any time.
APR has a well-established track record of identifying and recruiting the brightest numerate graduates entering the actuarial profession. Our market-leading training programme and the prospect of a wide range of challenging client projects make APR's graduate scheme an excellent place to start your actuarial career.
APR have introduced this scheme as a means of increasing access for bright, technically able people to the actuarial profession. APR's Junior Analyst Scheme offers employees the chance to enjoy the excellent training and challenging client opportunities for which APR is renowned, whilst working towards well established apprenticeships within actuarial, data science and business analytical fields.
Although historically most of our staff have joined APR at the outset of their actuarial career, we welcome applicants at all stages, whether they are part way through the actuarial exams or already qualified. Frequently more experienced actuarial associates join us to gain exposure to different areas of actuarial work, or as a means of experiencing more of a contract-type environment while retaining the security of permanent employment.
The majority of APR's work takes place on site at our clients' offices, which means that we have limited scope to offer longer-term internship opportunities. However, we run an annual Actuarial Insight Programme, an intensive, week-long introduction to actuarial work, the markets in which actuaries operate and some of the key techniques actuaries require.
