Description: This is original content that cites the value of networking within the workplace. It describes the benefits that accrue to the individual employee, as well as research findings on the positive impacts internal networking has for organizations. The article describes six specific skills that make internal networking effective. It also provides ideas for gaining proficiency in these skills in the natural course of daily work activity.

Description: This article is about the need for actuaries and technical professionals to develop critical leadership and other soft skills, and highlights the ways the SOA Leadership & Development section provides tools to develop those skills.

Description: The article describes principles for optimal sub-tasking of a project goal. Two experiments each one comparing different approaches are presented. A summary of principles for optimal goal setting presents seven key points: i)levels of outcome goals should be recognizable and lack ambiguity; ii) each subtask should be atomic, i.e. not be capable of being broken up into further subtasks, iii) the subtasks should be uniform, lacking ambiguity, so that any new trainee could master it without the need for further guidance; iv) each subtask should be attainable in a reasonable amount of time; v) mentor feedback should be provided during the initial stages of learning or training; vi) upon mastery of each subtask trainees should be encouraged to maximize their overall score; vii) after mastery of individual subtasks, while attempting to maximize scores, trainees should be provided with a mixture of easy, intermediate, and difficult tasks.

Description: Article presents the basic terminology and theory of attribution theory, the theory explaining the causes that people attribute their successes and failures to. The article reviews i) typical attributions(e.g. effort, luck), ii) dimensions of attribution (controllability, stability), iii) useful and non-useful attributions, and iv) attribution retraining and v) other aspects of the theory (such as accompanying emotions)

Description: This article introduces IT DevOps to actuaries and how it is applicable to them to improve their modeling efforts and make them more efficient.