How to get hired as an actuary in 2026-27

What an actuary actually does, and what gates the job

An actuary puts a price and a balance-sheet number on events that have not happened yet. In practice that means three families of work: pricing (what should this policy cost, given what we know about the risk and what the regulator will accept), reserving and valuation (how much money must sit on the balance sheet today for claims and benefits we already owe but have not yet paid), and risk and capital work (how bad can a year get, how much capital does that require, and what should we reinsure).

Everything else follows from those three. An actuary builds and documents models, chooses assumptions and defends them, signs or supports opinions that carry regulatory weight, and translates all of it for people who will not read the model: an underwriting chief, a CFO, a state insurance department reviewer, a plan sponsor, a board risk committee.

The job is gated by exams, not by a degree and not by a government license. That distinction matters for how you plan the next two years. A master's degree is rarely a requirement and almost never a shortcut. Exams are both the entry ticket and the promotion engine, and they are sat while you work, mostly on your employer's time and money, for the better part of a decade.

There is no legal protection of the word actuary in the United States, so you will see people doing actuarial work with the title analyst, and you will occasionally see someone call themselves an actuary with no exams. What is protected is the act of signing. A statutory reserve opinion for an insurer can only be signed by someone who meets the US Qualification Standards issued by the American Academy of Actuaries, which in practice means a credentialed actuary with the right practice-specific experience and continuing education. The actuarial schedules of a US defined benefit pension filing can only be signed by an Enrolled Actuary, which is a federal enrollment rather than a professional designation.

That signature structure explains the shape of the career. Below the signature there is a long apprenticeship of model building, data wrangling and documentation. The exams are what move you up it, and the professional standards (the Actuarial Standards of Practice, issued by the Actuarial Standards Board) are what you are measured against once you are near it. ASOP No. 56 on modeling is the one most worth reading early, because it is about exactly the work a new analyst does: understanding a model you did not build, testing it, and saying what it can and cannot support.

The practice areas are genuinely different jobs sharing one credentialing system, and a candidate who treats them as interchangeable interviews badly. Life and annuity work is long-horizon, assumption-heavy, and dominated by valuation systems and accounting change. Health work is annual, political, data-rich and runs on a filing calendar. Property and casualty work is loss triangles, rate filings and catastrophe exposure. Pension work is legislation, plan documents and funded status. Reinsurance work is deals.

The day-to-day skill that surprises people is data engineering by another name. A large share of a junior actuary's week is getting data out of a policy administration or claims system, reconciling it to something financial, and producing a number that ties. If you cannot write a join, you will spend that week asking someone else to write it for you.

The second surprise is writing. Actuarial work product is documents: a rate filing memorandum, an experience study, an assumption basis, a reserve memo, a model validation report. Regulators read them, auditors challenge them, and your successor depends on them. Hiring managers test for this in interviews more deliberately than candidates expect, usually by asking you to explain something technical to someone who is not technical.

The market in 2026-27 has an unusual shape worth understanding before you plan. Credentialed actuaries with five to fifteen years of experience are genuinely scarce, which is why pay and job security at that level are strong. Entry-level seats are the bottleneck, because the number of students who have passed two exams has grown faster than the number of training seats employers fund. So the career is hard to get into and comfortable once you are in. Plan for the entry problem specifically, and do not read the headline statistics about actuarial demand as a statement about your first job.

• Pricing: setting rates and premiums, building rating plans, filing them with state insurance departments, and monitoring whether what you charged matches what happened.
• Reserving and valuation: estimating liabilities for claims incurred but not yet paid or not yet reported (IBNR), setting policy reserves, and supporting the opinion that goes with a statutory annual statement.
• Capital and risk: economic capital modeling, own risk and solvency assessment work, reinsurance structuring, catastrophe model output interpretation, stress and scenario testing.
• Experience studies: measuring actual mortality, morbidity, lapse, claim frequency or severity against what was assumed, and recommending an assumption change with evidence.
• Product work: designing and repricing a product, modeling profitability, and advising on features that change the risk rather than the marketing.
• Health-specific: Medicare Advantage bid work, Medicaid rate certification, ACA individual market rate development, risk adjustment, trend analysis, medical loss ratio reporting, and provider contract evaluation.
• Pension-specific: funding valuations, liability measurement, Form 5500 actuarial schedules, pension risk transfer pricing, and benefit calculation review.
• Life-specific: statutory and GAAP valuation, asset liability management, principle-based reserving, and the long-duration accounting work that reshaped the valuation close at life insurers.
• Model documentation and validation: writing down what a model does, testing it, and demonstrating control. ASOP No. 56 is the professional standard behind this work.
• Translation: making a technical result usable by an underwriter, a CFO, a regulator or a plan sponsor, in their language, with the uncertainty stated honestly.
• Tooling in practice: Excel at a level most people overestimate their own skill at, SQL against policy and claims data, Python or R for modeling, and a vendor valuation or pricing platform that depends on the practice area.
• Not the job: individual investment advice, accounting close ownership, selling, or underwriting individual cases. Actuaries sit next to all four and do none of them.

The exam system: SOA or CAS, and how many exams you actually need

This is the question searchers ask most, and it has a clean answer for the part that matters and a deliberately vague answer for the part that moves. The clean part: two exams gets you considered for a full-time entry-level actuarial job in almost every US market, and those two exams are the same whichever body you eventually join.

Exam P (Probability) and Exam FM (Financial Mathematics) are accepted by both the SOA and the CAS. Sit them first, in either order, and you have bought yourself time to choose a track. Most candidates find FM the easier of the two if their calculus is rusty and P the easier one if it is not. Both are multiple-choice, computer-based, sat at a Prometric center in windows spread through the year, and scored on a scaled range where 6 is a pass. The SOA publishes pass rates for every sitting, and for the preliminary exams they have typically run below half the candidates, so plan on the possibility of a resit rather than treating one as a catastrophe.

After P and FM the paths separate, and this is where published advice goes stale fastest. Both bodies have restructured their pathways more than once in the last few years, renaming exams, merging them, and moving material between an exam and an e-learning module. Do not plan a multi-year exam sequence from a forum post or from this page. Read the current syllabus and transition rules on soa.org or casact.org before you register for anything beyond FM, and read them again each year.

The stable shape, as opposed to the current exam names, is this. The SOA route to ASA layers on statistics and predictive modeling, short-term and long-term actuarial mathematics, three Validation by Educational Experience (VEE) topics (economics, accounting and finance, and mathematical statistics) that you satisfy with approved coursework rather than an exam, a multi-module e-learning course with a final assessment, and a professionalism course. Fellowship then specializes into a track: individual life and annuities, group and health, retirement benefits, corporate finance and ERM, or quantitative finance and investment.

The CAS route to ACAS layers on two modern actuarial statistics exams, then ratemaking and reserving, then insurance regulation and financial reporting, with online courses and a course on professionalism alongside. Fellowship adds policy liability estimation and company valuation, advanced ratemaking, and financial risk and rate of return. The upper CAS exams are written-answer and sat twice a year, which changes the economics of failing: a missed SOA preliminary costs you a few weeks, a missed CAS Exam 7 costs you six months and often a promotion cycle.

How to choose between them. Choose CAS if you want property and casualty: auto, home, commercial lines, workers compensation, specialty, reinsurance, catastrophe risk. Choose SOA if you want life, annuities, health, retirement, or investment work. The practical tiebreakers are geographic (look at which carriers actually employ actuaries within commuting distance of where you intend to live) and temperamental (P and C work is more statistical and more adversarial with regulators on rate; life and health work is more accounting-adjacent and more assumption-driven). Switching later is possible and costs you exams, so it is worth an afternoon of research now.

Does a third exam help? At the margin, yes, and much less than candidates believe. A third exam signals commitment and gets you past a screen at employers who have more applicants than seats. It does not compensate for no internship, no SQL and no evidence that you can communicate. If you have a free summer and a choice between a third exam and an internship at a small regional insurer, take the internship every time.

Two things candidates underweight. First, register for your next sitting before you start applying, and put the date on your resume, because the question every actuarial interviewer asks is 'what is your next exam and when'. An answer with a date in it reads as a plan; an answer without one reads as a hope. Second, finish your VEE credits while you are still enrolled somewhere, because approved coursework is far cheaper as a student than as a working adult.

• Shared first two exams: Exam P (Probability) and Exam FM (Financial Mathematics), accepted by both the SOA and the CAS. Sit these before you commit to a body.
• SOA credentials: ASA (Associate) then FSA (Fellow), with fellowship tracks in life and annuities, group and health, retirement, corporate finance and ERM, and quantitative finance and investment.
• CAS credentials: ACAS (Associate) then FCAS (Fellow), all property and casualty.
• VEE: three topics satisfied by approved coursework rather than exams. Clear them while you are a student if you possibly can.
• Pathways change: both bodies have restructured recently. Verify the current exam list and transition rules on soa.org or casact.org, not on a forum, before registering beyond FM.
• Study materials candidates actually use: Coaching Actuaries (Adapt) for adaptive practice problems, ASM and The Infinite Actuary for manuals and video, Rising Fellow and BattleActs for the upper CAS exams. Budget for one of them; raw past papers alone is the slow route.
• Other countries: the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) in the UK and Ireland runs its own exam series and AIA or FIA credentials, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries grants ACIA and FCIA on top of SOA or CAS exams plus Canadian practice education, and the Actuaries Institute runs the Australian pathway. UK graduate schemes commonly hire with zero exams passed and fund the lot, which is a real structural difference from the US market.

Which employers hire at which exam count

The honest version of this is a distribution, not a table, and it moves with the hiring cycle. What follows is the pattern that holds across normal years, and you should test it against live postings in your own market before you believe it about any specific company.

Zero exams gets you a student job, a scholarship application, or a non-actuarial analyst role at an insurer. Essentially no US employer hires a full-time actuarial analyst with no exam passed, because the exam is how they predict whether you will finish the credential they are about to spend six figures of study support on. In the UK and Ireland the opposite is normal, because graduate schemes there do the exams for you from scratch.

One exam gets you an internship at most employers and a full-time job at some. Internship postings from large rotational programs usually ask for one exam passed or one scheduled, and the competitive reality at the best-known programs is that successful candidates often have two. Full-time roles at one exam are real at smaller regional carriers, state insurance departments, third party administrators, Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, captives and smaller consultancies, which collectively hire more entry-level actuaries than the famous names and attract a fraction of the applications.

Two exams is the working threshold. At two exams, plus an internship and basic technical evidence, you are a normal candidate for a rotational actuarial development program, a pricing or reserving analyst seat, or a consulting analyst role. This is the configuration most first jobs are filled from.

Three or more exams moves you up a screening pile and starts to matter differently: it signals you are already partway to associateship, which is attractive to employers with a thin pipeline, and at some companies it shifts your starting level and salary rather than just your odds. It also becomes a liability in one specific case, which is a candidate with five exams, no internship and no evidence of working with data, who reads as someone who likes exams rather than someone who likes the job.

Consultancies behave differently from insurers and it is worth knowing how. Milliman, Oliver Wyman, WTW, Aon, Mercer, the Big Four actuarial practices, and P and C specialists such as Pinnacle and Perr and Knight run interview processes closer to management consulting: a case or technical exercise, more emphasis on client communication, more variability in study support between offices, and often a higher expectation that you can write. Insurer programs run structured rotations, formal study programs, and a more predictable first two years.

Three employer categories candidates routinely overlook. State insurance departments and the NAIC hire entry-level actuarial staff, pay less than carriers, and give you rate-filing review experience that is genuinely valuable later. Health plans, especially regional Medicaid and Medicare Advantage focused plans, have grown their actuarial teams and have constant need. And reinsurance brokers and intermediaries hire analysts into pricing and analytics work that is closer to deal-making than a carrier seat is.

One market observation that should change your application list. In 2026-27, hiring activity has been steadiest in health (driven by government program work, risk adjustment and trend volatility) and in property and casualty pricing (driven by property catastrophe exposure, reinsurance cost pass-through and auto severity), and flatter in traditional life valuation where a wave of accounting change work has largely landed. If you are indifferent between tracks, that is an argument for health or P and C.

• Zero exams: internships at some employers, scholarships, non-actuarial analyst roles, and UK or Irish graduate schemes that fund exams from scratch.
• One exam plus a booked second: internships at most employers, full-time roles at regional carriers, state insurance departments, TPAs, Blue plans, captives and smaller consultancies.
• Two exams plus an internship: the standard profile for a rotational actuarial development program or a pricing, reserving or consulting analyst seat.
• Three or more exams: better odds, sometimes a higher start level, and no substitute for an internship.
• Large insurer rotational programs to look at: Travelers, Nationwide, State Farm, USAA, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Chubb, Progressive, GEICO, Erie, Auto-Owners, New York Life, MassMutual, Northwestern Mutual, Prudential, Pacific Life, John Hancock, Humana, Elevance, UnitedHealth and Optum, CVS and Aetna, Cigna.
• Reinsurers: RGA, Munich Re, Swiss Re, SCOR, Gen Re, and the broker side at Aon, Guy Carpenter, Gallagher Re and Lockton Re.
• Consultancies: Milliman, Oliver Wyman, WTW, Aon, Mercer, Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG, Pinnacle, Perr and Knight, Huggins, and the many small regional firms that never appear on a campus list.
• Public sector: state insurance departments, the NAIC, the CMS Office of the Actuary, the Social Security Administration Office of the Chief Actuary, state retirement systems, and workers compensation rating bureaus.

Internships, and the fall recruiting cycle that decides your next summer

If you read only one section, read this one. The single most common reason a strong actuarial student does not get a first job is that they looked for a summer internship in the spring. Large actuarial employers recruit interns in the fall of the preceding academic year, and many close applications before the winter break. By March the good programs are full and you are competing for what is left.

The same calendar governs new-graduate hiring. Rotational program seats for a June or July start are frequently filled from September to December of the previous year, often from the intern class. That is the mechanism that makes the internship so decisive: at many insurers a large share of entry-level full-time offers go to people who already interned there, so the internship is not practice for the job hunt, it is the job hunt.

What an internship application needs is modest and specific: one exam passed or registered, a GPA above the floor the posting states (programs commonly publish one, often 3.0 or 3.2), evidence you can use Excel beyond typing, and a one-page resume that puts the exam at the top. Do not wait until you have two exams to apply. Apply with one and a sitting date.

If your school has an actuarial program, use its machinery, because it exists for this calendar. SOA designated Universities and Colleges with Actuarial Programs (the UCAP listing) and the CAS University Award Program identify schools whose career offices have relationships with actuarial employers, run actuarial career fairs, and know which recruiter at which carrier takes resumes in October. If your school has none of this, you replace it with the two things below.

First, CAS Student Central. Free student membership from the Casualty Actuarial Society, with study material, and a Student Central Summer Program that gives you a simulated property and casualty work project you can put on a resume. For a candidate with no internship and no actuarial program, a completed simulated project is the cheapest credible line on the page. The SOA runs candidate resources and a student community in the same spirit.

Second, regional actuarial clubs. Almost every metropolitan area with an insurance industry has one: a casualty actuaries club, an actuaries club of the city, a chapter that meets quarterly and lets students attend. A student who turns up to three meetings and talks to people is known to the hiring managers in that city in a way that an online applicant is not. This is not networking theatre, it is a small profession where the person reviewing your resume probably attended the same meeting.

If you are already graduated with no internship, the substitute is a real project with real data and a written deliverable. Not a Kaggle notebook. Get a public dataset with insurance structure in it (state insurance department rate filings, the CMS public use files, NAIC data, a public loss triangle dataset, open catastrophe or weather data), build something that an actuary would recognize as actuarial work, and write up the assumptions, the limitations and the result in two pages. A fitted frequency and severity model with a written assumption basis beats a dashboard.

One thing not to do: a data science bootcamp instead of an exam. Employers hiring actuarial analysts screen on exams and then on evidence, and a bootcamp certificate is neither. If you want to spend money on a credential, spend it on the exam fee and a study manual.

• Apply in the fall, roughly nine months before the start date, for both internships and new-graduate program seats. Many applications close before the winter break.
• Apply with one exam and a registered sitting. Waiting for the second exam often costs you a whole cycle.
• Expect a stated GPA floor on program postings, commonly 3.0 or above, and expect the posting to mean it.
• Use your school's actuarial program if it has one, including the SOA UCAP listing and the CAS University Award Program as a way to find schools and events that employers already attend.
• Join CAS Student Central (free) and complete the Student Central Summer Program if you have no internship. Use SOA candidate resources alongside it.
• Attend your regional actuaries club. Three meetings makes you a person rather than a PDF.
• If graduated with no internship: build one defensible actuarial project on public insurance data, with a written assumption and limitation section, and put a link on your resume.
• Second-choice internships worth taking: state insurance department, TPA, broker analytics, a captive, a Blue plan, a small consultancy, or an internal audit or underwriting analytics team at a carrier you then transfer from.

The resume an actuarial recruiter actually reads

One page for an entry-level actuarial resume. Two only once you have several years of experience. The person screening it is often a recruiter who is not an actuary, working from a checklist supplied by the actuarial team, and the checklist starts with exams. If they have to hunt for your exam status, you have already lost the ten seconds you had.

Put exams in a dedicated section near the top, above education for a graduate and above experience for a career changer. Name each exam the way the body names it, give the month and year you passed, and give the date of your next registered sitting. 'Exam P (Probability), passed September 2026. Exam FM, registered for February 2027.' That is the format. 'Actuarial exams: in progress' is worthless and reads as evasion.

VEE belongs there too, as a short line: which of the three topics you have credit for, or that coursework is complete and approval is pending. Many candidates have the credits and never say so, which costs them a question in the interview that should have been a tick on the screen.

Experience bullets should be written the way actuarial work is measured: what data, how much of it, what model or method, what decision it supported, and what changed. 'Built a monthly lapse experience study in SQL and Excel covering 400,000 policy years, compared actual to expected by issue age band, and recommended an assumption change the pricing team adopted' is a bullet. 'Assisted with data analysis using Excel' is not. If your only experience is a non-actuarial job, write it the same way: volumes, tools, decisions.

Technical skills need to be specific and true. List Excel with what you actually do in it (Power Query, pivot tables, INDEX and MATCH or XLOOKUP, array formulas, VBA if real), SQL with the flavor and what you do with it (joins, window functions, aggregation across claim and policy tables), and Python or R with libraries you have genuinely used. Naming a vendor system you have touched is high-value because few candidates can: Prophet, AXIS, Polysystems, Arius, ResQ, Radar or Emblem, Earnix, Akur8, Guidewire, or a specific predictive modeling stack.

What gets ignored. A summary or objective paragraph. A long list of coursework (two or three genuinely relevant advanced courses, named, is useful; a transcript dump is not). Soft skill adjectives with no artefact behind them. Certificates from online course platforms. A photo. Anything about being detail oriented, which every actuarial resume says and none of them demonstrate.

Applicant tracking systems in insurance are unglamorous and literal. Write the exam names in full as well as short form, use both 'Exam P' and 'Probability', spell out 'Society of Actuaries (SOA)' and 'Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS)' once each, and use the practice-area vocabulary of the posting (reserving, ratemaking, loss development, IBNR, trend, PMPM, rate filing) where it is honestly true of your experience.

• Exams at the top, each with pass month and year, plus the date of the next registered sitting.
• VEE status as its own line, by topic.
• GPA included if it clears the common floors, and omitted rather than hidden if it does not. Postings often state the floor explicitly.
• One page, reverse chronological, no objective paragraph.
• Bullets with volumes, tools, method and the decision the work supported.
• Technical skills listed at the level you would survive a live test on: Excel specifics, SQL specifics, Python or R libraries, any vendor actuarial system by name.
• A link to one written project if you have no internship, with the assumptions and limitations visible.

How the process runs, and what the interview really tests

Actuarial hiring is structured but not long. For an entry-level seat, expect a resume screen, sometimes an online assessment or a recorded one-way video, a recruiter call, one or two interviews with actuaries, and a decision. Large programs often compress the actuary-facing part into a single half-day of back-to-back conversations, on campus or virtually. Elapsed time is commonly two to six weeks once you are in the process, though the fall cycle at big programs can leave offers sitting until a cohort decision in the winter.

The technical bar in an entry-level actuarial interview is lower than candidates fear and the communication bar is higher. They already know you can do mathematics, because you passed an exam that proves it under timed conditions. What they do not know is whether you can hold a conversation with an underwriter, write a memo someone else can follow, or admit that you do not know something.

So the questions that decide the outcome are usually these. Why actuarial work, answered with something more specific than 'I am good at maths and like problem solving'. Which exams, when, and what is your plan if you fail one. Explain a technical concept to someone with no technical background, which is the single most predictive question in the set. Tell me about a time the data was wrong. Tell me about a time you had to change your answer. What do you understand this company to actually sell.

Technical content does appear and it is practice-area shaped. For property and casualty, expect loss ratio, pure premium, frequency and severity, loss development and why a triangle exists, the difference between case reserves and IBNR, earned versus written premium, and a conceptual chain ladder. For health, expect PMPM, trend, medical loss ratio, risk adjustment at a conceptual level, and the difference between an allowed and a paid amount. For life, expect present value mechanics, mortality and lapse assumptions, the difference between statutory and GAAP, and what a reserve is for. Knowing these at a conversational level, from an exam-adjacent book or an employer's own investor materials, puts you ahead of most applicants.

Excel tests are real and more common than SQL tests at entry level. A typical one gives you a small dataset and twenty to forty minutes to build something: a lookup across two tables, a pivot, a simple development factor calculation, a chart that is readable. Practise on a laptop with the keyboard you will use, because the test is partly about speed. If a SQL test appears, it will be joins and aggregation, not window-function trivia.

Consulting interviews add a case. It is not a management consulting market-sizing puzzle. It is usually a client situation: a plan sponsor wants to know whether to change a benefit, a carrier is losing money in one state, a self-insured employer wants a forecast. They are watching how you structure the problem, what you ask for, which simplifications you flag, and whether you state the uncertainty rather than producing a confident single number.

Expect to be asked what happens if you fail an exam, and have a real answer. The correct answer involves a sitting date, a change in how you will study, and no drama. Everyone in the room has failed one. Candidates lose points for treating it as unthinkable, because the interviewer is trying to find out whether you will still be a candidate in eighteen months.

Reference and background checks in insurance are routine and occasionally include a credit or fidelity check for roles with financial reporting exposure. Nothing unusual, but it adds a week.

One stage candidates mishandle: the recruiter call. The recruiter is not an actuary and is checking exams, start date, location, visa status, salary expectation and whether you sound like someone who will turn up. Have a number ready, sourced from the BLS occupational data and the recruiter salary surveys rather than a guess, and have your exam dates in front of you.

• Typical stages: resume screen, optional online assessment or recorded video, recruiter call, one or two actuary interviews (often a compressed half-day at large programs), offer.
• Typical elapsed time: two to six weeks in process. Fall-cycle program offers may wait for a cohort decision.
• The decisive question: explain a technical concept to a non-technical person. Prepare two, from your own work, and practise them out loud.
• The second decisive question: your exam plan, including what you will do if you fail.
• Practice-area vocabulary to be conversational in before the call, matched to the employer: loss ratio, loss development, IBNR, pure premium (P and C); PMPM, trend, medical loss ratio, risk adjustment (health); statutory versus GAAP, mortality, lapse (life); funded status, liability measurement (pension).
• Excel test: likely. Twenty to forty minutes, lookups, pivots, a development factor, a legible chart.
• Consulting case: a client situation, judged on structure, assumptions named, and uncertainty stated.
• Know what the company sells. Reading one page of an insurer's annual report or investor deck beats any amount of generic preparation.

Pay, the exam raise, and the study program you must interrogate before signing

Be skeptical of any single salary figure for an actuary, because pay in this occupation is driven by a variable most salary sites ignore: exams passed. A band quoted without an exam count and a practice area is close to meaningless. The useful sources are the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for code 15-2011 (Actuaries), which gives you the occupational distribution and how it varies by state and metro, and the annual salary surveys published by actuarial recruiting firms such as DW Simpson and Ezra Penland, which are organized exactly the way the market pays: by exams passed and years of experience, split by practice area and by company type. Add the ranges employers are now required to publish in postings under state pay-transparency laws, which for this occupation are unusually informative because the posting usually names the exam expectation alongside the range.

The structural fact worth internalizing is that an actuary's pay steps at exams, not only at review cycles. Most employer study programs attach a raise, a bonus, or both to each pass, and the cumulative effect over the first five years is large enough that two candidates who started together can diverge substantially on exam pace alone. This is the main reason the study program is worth more scrutiny than the starting salary.

Interrogate the study program before you sign, with specific questions rather than 'do you support exams'. How many paid study hours per sitting, and are they hours you are actually allowed to take when the team is busy. Are exam fees, manuals and seminars paid up front or reimbursed on a pass. Is there a cap on funded attempts per exam, and what happens when you hit it. Is the per-pass raise a published scale or discretionary. Is there a day off before the exam. Is there a clawback if you leave within a year of a paid sitting. Who in the team has recently made FSA or FCAS, which tells you whether the program works in practice or only on paper.

Compare offers on total structure rather than base. A program with generous study time, funded resits, a published per-exam raise and a manager who protects study days is worth more over three years than a higher base with none of that, because it changes how fast you reach the credential that repices you.

Two other terms that matter in insurance offers. Rotation structure, if it is a rotational program: how long each rotation is, whether you choose, and whether rotations cross pricing, reserving and modeling (which is what makes a program valuable) or only move you between teams doing the same work. And location policy, because actuarial work has settled into a mixed arrangement where a lot of teams are hybrid with a named office, and a fully remote entry-level actuarial seat is still uncommon enough that you should not plan a career on it.

• BLS OES 15-2011 (Actuaries) for the occupational wage distribution by state and metropolitan area.
• DW Simpson and Ezra Penland annual salary surveys for pay keyed to exams passed, which is how this market actually prices people.
• State pay-transparency postings, which for actuarial roles often state the exam expectation next to the range.
• Ask: paid study hours per sitting, funded attempts cap, up-front versus reimbursed fees, published per-exam raise, exam-day leave, clawback on leaving.
• Ask who in the team has credentialed recently. A program nobody finishes is not a program.

No offer yet: the routes in that actually work

Most advice for aspiring actuaries ends at 'pass more exams', which is why so many candidates arrive with four exams, no experience, and no offers. If you are stuck, the problem is almost never your exam count. It is that you have no insurance-adjacent work history and nothing written down that an actuary can evaluate. Here is the order that pays off fastest.

The highest-yield move is a non-actuarial seat inside an insurer, health plan, TPA or broker, taken deliberately as a route in. Underwriting assistant, pricing analyst, claims analyst, reporting analyst, risk adjustment analyst, data analyst, actuarial technician, reinsurance analyst. These roles hire on skills rather than exams, they are vastly less competitive than an actuarial development program, and once inside you have three advantages an outside applicant does not: the company's own study program is often open to you, internal transfer postings reach you first, and your experience bullets are finally in the right vocabulary. Many working actuaries entered this way and it is not a lesser path.

The second move is geographic honesty. Actuarial employment is concentrated in specific cities (Hartford, Des Moines, Columbus, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, Omaha, Milwaukee, Charlotte, Richmond and others), and candidates who restrict themselves to a city with two carriers in it spend years competing for a handful of seats. If you are able to move, say so in the application, because a willingness to relocate is a real tiebreaker at carriers headquartered in smaller markets.

The third move is to widen the employer list downward in brand recognition and outward in sector. For every application to a household-name insurer, send one to a regional mutual, a Blue plan, a workers compensation specialist, a captive manager, a state insurance department, a third party administrator, a small consultancy or a rating bureau. These employers have the same credential path, often better study support relative to size, and a fraction of the applicant volume.

The fourth move is one written artefact. Pick a question an actuary would recognize, answer it with public data, and write two pages: purpose, data, method, assumptions, limitations, result. Fit a frequency and severity model to a public auto dataset and compare it to a pure premium approach. Build a loss triangle and apply a chain ladder, then say honestly where the method breaks. Take public rate filings from a state insurance department and summarize what drove approved increases in one line. Each of those gives an interviewer something to ask about, which is the whole point.

The fifth move is the profession's own machinery, which is more open than people expect. Attend a regional actuaries club meeting. Join CAS Student Central. Go to an SOA or CAS webcast and then email the speaker one specific question. Volunteer for a committee or a research project (both bodies recruit volunteers, including candidates). Apply for the Actuarial Foundation and affiliate scholarships, which are small money and a real line on a resume.

What not to do, stated plainly. Do not pay for a general data science bootcamp hoping it substitutes for an exam or an internship, because actuarial screens do not read it that way. Do not sit a fifth exam instead of taking an insurance-adjacent job. Do not apply exclusively in the spring. And do not go quiet on a near-miss: an employer who interviewed you and hired someone else is the warmest lead you have, and a short note in October asking about the next cycle gets answered more often than a cold application ever does.

• Take an insurance-adjacent analyst role deliberately: underwriting, pricing, claims analytics, reporting, risk adjustment, reinsurance, actuarial technician. Then use the internal transfer and the employer's study program.
• Be geographically honest and say you will relocate. Actuarial jobs cluster in specific cities.
• Pair every household-name application with one to a regional mutual, Blue plan, TPA, captive, rating bureau, state insurance department or small consultancy.
• Produce one written actuarial artefact on public data, with assumptions and limitations stated.
• Use the profession: regional club meetings, CAS Student Central, SOA and CAS webcasts, volunteer committees, Actuarial Foundation and affiliate scholarships.
• Re-contact every employer that interviewed you, in the next fall cycle, by name.
• Do not substitute a bootcamp for an exam, or a fifth exam for experience.

What a screen is looking for

These are the terms that a resume screen, human or automated, is matching against for this role. Use the ones that are true of you, in the words the posting uses.

• Actuary
• Actuarial analyst
• Actuarial associate
• Actuarial assistant
• Actuarial student
• Entry level actuary
• Actuarial development program
• Actuarial rotational program
• Actuarial intern
• Actuarial internship
• Society of Actuaries (SOA)
• Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS)
• ASA
• FSA
• ACAS
• FCAS
• Associate of the Society of Actuaries
• Fellow of the Society of Actuaries
• Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society
• Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society
• American Academy of Actuaries
• MAAA
• Enrolled Actuary
• EA
• Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries
• Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA)
• FIA
• Canadian Institute of Actuaries
• FCIA
• Exam P
• Probability
• Exam FM
• Financial Mathematics
• Exam SRM
• Exam FAM
• Exam ALTAM
• Exam ASTAM
• Exam PA
• MAS-I
• MAS-II
• Exam 5
• Exam 6
• Exam 7
• Exam 8
• Exam 9
• Validation by Educational Experience
• VEE
• FAP
• Fundamentals of Actuarial Practice
• Associateship Professionalism Course
• Course on Professionalism
• Actuarial exams
• Exam progress
• Study program
• Paid study hours
• Pricing
• Ratemaking
• Rate filing
• Rate indication
• Rate review
• SERFF
• Pure premium
• Loss cost
• Rating plan
• Classification plan
• Territory analysis
• Price optimization
• Reserving
• Loss reserving
• Reserve review
• Loss development
• Development factors
• Loss triangle
• Chain ladder
• Bornhuetter-Ferguson
• IBNR
• Case reserves
• Statement of Actuarial Opinion
• Appointed Actuary
• Schedule P
• Statutory annual statement
• Valuation
• Statutory reserves
• GAAP reserves
• Principle-based reserving
• PBR
• Asset liability management
• Cash flow testing
• Long-duration targeted improvements
• LDTI
• IFRS 17
• Solvency II
• Own Risk and Solvency Assessment
• ORSA
• Risk-based capital
• Economic capital
• Embedded value
• Experience study
• Mortality
• Morbidity
• Lapse
• Persistency
• Frequency
• Severity
• Trend
• Loss ratio
• Combined ratio
• Expense ratio
• Earned premium
• Written premium
• Exposure
• PMPM
• Per member per month
• Medical loss ratio
• MLR
• Risk adjustment
• Medicare Advantage bid
• Medicaid rate certification
• ACA rate filing
• Capitation
• Provider contracting analysis
• Stop loss
• Self-funded
• Third party administrator
• Pension valuation
• Funded status
• Liability measurement
• Form 5500
• Defined benefit
• Pension risk transfer
• Plan design
• Retirement benefits
• Reinsurance
• Treaty pricing
• Excess of loss
• Quota share
• Catastrophe modeling
• Cat model
• Property catastrophe
• Workers compensation
• Commercial lines
• Personal lines
• Auto insurance
• Homeowners insurance
• Specialty lines
• Captive insurance
• Generalized linear model
• GLM
• Gradient boosting
• GBM
• XGBoost
• LightGBM
• Penalized regression
• Predictive modeling
• Predictive analytics
• Machine learning
• Model validation
• Model documentation
• Model risk management
• ASOP 56
• Actuarial Standards of Practice
• ASOP
• Unfair discrimination testing
• Model monitoring
• Excel
• Advanced Excel
• Power Query
• Pivot tables
• XLOOKUP
• VBA
• SQL
• T-SQL
• Python
• pandas
• R
• SAS
• Power BI
• Tableau
• Alteryx
• Git
• Prophet
• AXIS
• Polysystems
• MG-ALFA
• Arius
• ResQ
• Radar
• Emblem
• Earnix
• Akur8
• Guidewire
• Milliman MedInsight
• NAIC
• State insurance department
• Insurance regulation
• CMS
• Statutory reporting
• Actuarial memorandum
• Actuarial report writing
• Assumption setting
• Peer review
• Stakeholder communication
• Cross-functional collaboration with underwriting

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Questions people ask