Description: The author, the new Chair of the Management and Personal Development Section Council, will be using this column to share her personal development journey and hopes others can learn from and avoid her mistakes. From The Stepping Stone, February 2012, Issue No. 45.

Description: This is the Presidential Address by former SOA President, Daphne D. Bartlett focusing on her vision for the future of the actuarial profession. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1991, Vol. 43.

Description: This discussion looks at the changing needs for individual accident and sickness insurance, including coverage for older people [ages 65 and over]. The discussion seeks to answer: What changes in the scope of and market for individual accident and sickness insurance have taken place in recent years, and what revisions of policies and marketing procedures have been made or are indicated to meet changing needs? From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1959, Vol. 11, No. 31.

Description: This discussion looks at cash-flow testing and its use by smaller insurance companies. From Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 23, No. 1.

Description: This is the Index to Volume 16, Part 1 of Transactions of Society of Actuaries. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1964, Vol. 16, Pt. 1, No. 46.

Description: This article discusses building new retirement systems. It references an article published in the Economist, 'Actuaries and the pensions crunch: When the spinning stops,' Jan. 26, 2006, and the stir that article created in the pension community. This article suggests that we take our understanding of the global economy, business models, shareholder expectations, employee expectations, employment risks, pre-retirement risks and the emerging retirement paradigm and create a new retirement system. From Pension Section News, April 2006, No. 61.

Description: This article provides guidance for selling to top executives.

Description: Employee termination and retirement rates affect the valuation of employee benefit plans and thus are of concern to actuaries. To provide timely experience for the profession, the Society of Actuaries Pension Plan Turnover and Retirement Rates Committee organized a data collection effort. Thirty-two contributors provided almost 1.8 million life years of pension plan turnover data for years 1994-2000. This report documents the data assembly and verification procedures used in collecting the data.

Description: This article is a review of the book “Social Security” by Robert J. Myers, published in 1975 by Richard D. Irwin, Inc. The reviewer calls the book a “marvelous reference source from which to draw in getting a fix on literally hundreds of the finer points relating to eligibility, the method of calculating benefits, in fact the whole background and evolution of these benefits and methods,” and notes the book will be of value to anyone who works with employee benefits that relate in some way to the Social Security system.

Description: Most discussions of actuarial education focus on 'what actuaries need to know'– the knowledge content. This is akin to discussing say mortality by considering just one relevant factor [perhaps age]. Reflecting on more than a quarter of a century teaching thousands of actuarial students in eight countries across many cultures suggests that a curriculum is much more than a list of syllabus topics and that a realistic model of student learning needs to acknowledge many more factors than just the knowledge content and the 'ability' of the student. This paper summarises what the author has learned about learning. From that basis it identifies some challenges for actuarial educators, especially in the areas of the development of students’ skills, the assessment of students’ learning and the 'shape' of actuarial education. The relationship between universities and actuarial bodies is also discussed.