Description: This article shares tips for those starting out in the actuarial profession. The source is my experience and that of Ian Duncan FSA FIA FCIA MAAA and other actuaries.

Description: This article is about how entrepreneur independent business owners can solve their day-to-day frustrations and problems with a simple and useful process for setting goals and building a plan to meet those goals.

Description: The coordinator of the task force which prepared Manhart Brief, for a court case on sex discrimination in pension rates, responds to criticism.

Description: Discusses the life company actuary's responsibility to the insurance buying public, and the relationship to his concurrent responsibility to the agency force, stockholders, and present policyholders. Also discusses the employee benefit actuary's responsibility to plan beneficiaries and the relationship to his concurrent responsibility to employers and unions, and the public's interest in actuarial techniques and its need for meaningful actuarial explanation.

Description: This article discusses challenges that short-term predictions have on actuaries' reputations, both as individuals and as a profession, and discusses strategies to improve our professionalism and better manage this risk.

Description: Writing tips for actuaries – skipping the usual guidelines you get in most books on writing. They represent a half century of personal successes and failures.

Description: Software vendors participating in the A Comparative Analysis of Claims–Based Tools for Health Risk Assessment study were invited to submit comments on the study. In this document, Ingenix explains their contribution to the study's source data, and raises some questions about methodolgy.

Description: metadata for the entire issue

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: Humor in the workplace can improve productivity. This article describes a typical office relationship problem and how humor helped disparate teams work together.