I still remember the conversation that changed how I think about actuarial education. Several years ago, a recruiter from a major insurance company called me, frustrated. “Your students passed exams,” she said. “But when they show up, they can’t present to a room. They freeze when the data is messy. We need people who can actually do the work, not just calculate it.”
She was right. And she wasn’t alone.
Over the past decade of running an actuarial science program, I’ve watched the profession transform. The technical bar keeps rising—IFRS 17, predictive analytics, climate modeling—but that’s only half the story. The other half is harder to measure and harder to teach: Can you explain your model to a CFO who doesn’t care about your assumptions? Can you lead a project team that spans three time zones? Can you adapt when the problem doesn’t fit the textbook?
These aren’t soft skills; they’re survival skills. But we’re not teaching them systematically enough.
Here’s what I’ve learned works—and why I think we need to fundamentally rethink what “ready” means.
What Exams Don’t (and Can’t) Teach
Let me be blunt: exam preparation is necessary but insufficient. I say this as someone who spent years passing those same exams. They measure technical mastery beautifully, but they don’t measure whether you can function when the problem is ambiguous, the deadline is tomorrow, and your team disagrees on the approach.
Four years ago, I started pushing our students deep into case studies—not as extra credit, but as a core expectation. The first year was chaos. Teams missed the point of the case. Presentations ran overtime. One group spent 80% of its effort building an elaborate model and 5 minutes explaining what it meant. All the members got poor grades.
But here’s what happened: they learned more in different case study settings than in an entire semester of problem sets. Because suddenly, getting the “right answer” wasn’t enough. They had to defend it. Simplify it. Make choices under uncertainty. One student told me afterward, “I finally understand why communication matters. Nobody cares how good your model is if you can’t explain why they should trust it.”
At DePauw, we now prep our students intentionally: mock presentations, feedback on storytelling, practice defending assumptions under hostile questioning. Last year, our student risk management team made the finals of the Spencer-RIMS competition and eventually got second place. I’m just as proud of the teams that didn’t place, because they all came back different: more confident, more professional, battle-tested.
That’s what employers mean when they say “ready.” Not just credentialed. Proven.
The Leadership Gap Nobody Talks About
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most actuaries don’t get leadership training until they’re already managing people. By then, the damage is done. You can’t suddenly teach someone at 30 how to give difficult feedback or run an effective meeting when they’ve spent a decade working in isolation.
Leadership needs to start in college. Not in theory—in practice.
Our actuarial club used to be a resume line. Students showed up for free pizza and left. Then we flipped the model. We told students, “This is your organization. Run it like a business. Book your own speakers. Manage your own budget. Mentor the freshmen and sophomores. Own the outcomes.”
The transformation was remarkable. Students started cold-emailing actuaries and risk managers, crafting LinkedIn messages that actually got responses. They organized panels, negotiated with vendors and promoted events on social media. This year, our actuarial club president arranged a half-day job shadowing program at a local insurance company during spring break. More than 10 students followed actuaries through pricing meetings, reserving reviews and model validation sessions—the kind of access you simply can’t get from a career fair booth. Meanwhile, our Gamma Iota Sigma (GIS) president reached out to one of the neighboring chapters and cohosted a company guest speaker event. For our students, the real growth was internal. They learned to delegate, to handle conflict, to follow through when nobody was watching. These aren’t skills you can lecture about; you have to live them. And when these students interviewed, employers noticed immediately. The students spoke differently; they carried themselves differently; they were already professionals.
The International Student Opportunity We’re Wasting
This part frustrates me the most because we’re sitting on an enormous, underutilized opportunity. Every year, hundreds of brilliant international students come to study actuarial science in the United States. Many have already passed preliminary exams. They’re technically exceptional and deeply committed. But their employment rates lag behind those of domestic students—sometimes dramatically. The reasons are complex: visa concerns, network gaps, cultural adjustment, communication anxiety.
We can fix at least half of this and, in doing so, build exactly the kind of global-ready workforce the profession claims it wants.
When international students compete in case competitions, they’re forced to present in professional English under pressure. That’s much more effective than any English as a Second Language class. When they lead student organizations, they learn US business norms by doing, not observing. When they attend conferences and meet alumni, they build the networks that domestic students inherit by default.
I’ve watched this transformation firsthand. One student from Asia joined our program with strong technical skills but developing English proficiency. In her first semester, she barely spoke in class. Over the following semesters, she competed in several student case competitions, served on the board of our actuarial club, and pushed herself to attend three industry conferences where she had to network in English. By graduation, she was a different person. She presented her research project to a room of more than 50 people without notes, fielded questions confidently, and had four job offers. Her technical skills had improved, certainly—but the real transformation was in how she carried herself. She’d gone from avoiding eye contact to leading conversations.
This isn’t charity. It’s smart workforce development. Employers operating globally need actuaries who understand multiple markets, who can collaborate across cultures and who’ve already navigated complexity. International students are naturally suited for this—we just need to give them the platform to prove it.
Frankly, domestic students need global exposure just as much. We’re not preparing them adequately either. That’s why our department has started building international perspectives directly into coursework. In our senior seminar, students analyze an actuarial case study from East Asia—examining how pricing and reserving practices differ when you’re operating under different regulatory frameworks, mortality tables and economic conditions. It’s eye-opening. Students who’ve never thought beyond US markets suddenly realize that “best practices” are often just “local practices.”
We also push students to read actuarial publications from other countries. Not as homework, but as professional habit. The International Actuarial Association (IAA) regularly publishes global research that expands how actuaries think about risk. Recent work has explored climate-risk modeling in Pacific Island nations, pension reform efforts across Europe and microinsurance innovations in Africa. These studies aren’t just interesting case stories—they’re previews of the kinds of challenges US actuaries will soon face as climate, demographic and financial systems become increasingly interconnected.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I’m not proposing theory here. This is what we do, week by week, semester by semester:
Summer: Before students even arrive on campus, the planning starts. Student leaders brainstorm the year’s events, identify guest speakers they want to bring in and write funding proposals.
Fall: Internship preparation becomes relentless. Freshmen join the actuarial club and learn what an actuarial internship actually involves. Sophomores and juniors update resumes, practice behavioral interviews and start applying. We host guest speakers monthly—actuaries from pricing, reserving, enterprise risk management and health insurance who share what they do all day. In late September, students attend the GIS Conference, where they’re not just observers, but active networkers building connections they’ll use for years.
Spring: The intensity shifts. Students prepare for different case competitions, and some start in late fall. We continue guest speaker events, but now they’re more targeted: career switchers, international actuaries, people who’ve taken nontraditional paths. In March, we organize job shadowing at local insurance companies where students follow actuaries through real workdays. As the semester closes, leadership transitions happen—outgoing officers mentor incoming ones, passing down institutional knowledge and setting expectations.
Year-round: Faculty advisors treat student organizations like professional development labs, not social clubs. We give feedback on emails, presentations and LinkedIn profiles. We make introductions. We push students to take risks they wouldn’t take alone. Critically, we host internship sharing workshops where students who’ve completed internships present what they’ve learned—the technical work, the office culture, the mistakes they made, the advice they wish they’d had. These sessions are gold. Freshmen hear from juniors who were in their shoes 18 months ago, making the path forward feel achievable rather than abstract.
Does this take time? Absolutely. Is it “extra” work beyond curriculum? Technically, yes. But I’ve stopped seeing it that way. This is the curriculum now. Teaching stochastic models matters. Teaching students how to become professionals who can apply those models matters more.
What Employers Should Look For
If you’re hiring actuaries, here’s my advice: stop optimizing purely for exam progress and GPA. Those metrics are table stakes. Start asking different questions:
- Tell me about a time you presented technical work to a nontechnical audience.
- Have you competed in any case competitions? What did you learn?
- What professional organizations have you been involved with? What did you do there?
- Describe a project where the data were incomplete or messy. How did you proceed?
Students who’ve participated in competitions, led organizations and presented at conferences will answer these questions differently. More specifically. More confidently. Because they’ve actually lived it.
The Actuaries We Really Need
The actuarial profession keeps talking about “the future of work” and “evolving skill sets.” But we’re still largely educating and hiring for the past—for the era when actuaries worked alone in back offices solving well-defined problems.
That era is over. Modern actuaries work on cross-functional teams. They explain risk to executives who barely remember algebra. They navigate ambiguity daily. They operate in global organizations where “morning” depends on your time zone.
We can prepare students for this reality. But it requires letting go of the idea that education ends at technical mastery. It requires building experiences—competitions, leadership roles, global exposure—directly into how we develop talent.
Holistic actuaries don’t just calculate risk. They communicate it, contextualize it and lead teams to manage it effectively. Those are the professionals employers are desperate to hire — and the kind our programs must keep producing.
This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Neither the Society of Actuaries nor the respective authors’ employers make any endorsement, representation or guarantee with regard to any content, and disclaim any liability in connection with the use or misuse of any information provided herein. This article should not be construed as professional or financial advice. Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries or the respective authors’ employers.
Zhixin Wu, Ph.D., ASA, MAAA, is professor of business analytics and Ian M. Rolland professor of mathematical sciences at DePauw University. Zhixin can be reached at zhixinwu@depauw.edu.