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Double Take -- by Mark Sproxton

Illustration by Kathy Lycka

What is an actuary? As the joke goes, someone who makes an accountant look exciting. Steeped with a great knowledge of math, statistics, probabilities and the like, actuaries calculate insurance rates or help design pension and group benefit plans.

Living in Calgary, however, actuaries specializing in insurance are few. "There are no insurance opportunities in Calgary," said Chris Brisebois, a Calgary actuary who works on pension plans and group benefit plans for Buck Consultants. "They are more on the pension side."

With the concentration of insurance companies increasing, actuaries dealing directly with insurance live mainly in Canada's largest cities. But that doesn't mean you can't move from one specialization to the other. "You can transfer," Brisebois said. "They're looking for a certain skill set. The day-to-day tasks differ, but the skills are similar."

In insurance, actuaries use their math skills and knowledge of societal trends to estimate the risk involved in writing an insurance policy, be it for property or someone's life. In pensions, for example, similar calculations would have to be made to determine how much a group should pay into a policy, how the policy should be designed and how it should be managed. "Basically, you're dealing with complex problems that are very qualitative with a variety of considerations," Brisebois said.

Regardless of which path actuaries follow, all must complete a gruelling testing and licensing process that takes years. "If you're interested in it you should be prepared to get through the exam process," Brisebois said. "You pretty much have to give up your life around exam time for five or six years at a minimum." To become a fully-licensed actuary, a series of exams through the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries must be completed.

Brisebois lists the exam process as the worst part of the job, but said he enjoys the hours of work, essentially 40 hours a week with the rare weekend. And being a consultant, he moves from project to project meaning there's a great variety in the work. Depending on experience and the number of actuarial exams someone has passed will determine their pay. Someone just starting out will earn around $35,000 a year and can move to over $100,000 a year once fully qualified, he added.

Regardless of whether you stay in Calgary to become a pension actuary, or move to a larger centre to work on the insurance side of things, the work requires an analytical mind, the ability to spend time on computers using complex software and a comfort with numbers. "You have to do the number crunching right, because mistakes can be costly."