I originally talked about Chartered Actuary status (here, with the cartoon above) when the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) first proposed the idea and set up a consultation in 2018. I said then that sometimes an idea comes along that seems so obviously good that you wonder why it hasn’t been done a long time ago.
Four years on from the retreat from the proposal following the slenderest of straw polls offering some challenge, and it remains a good idea. There are still relatively few full actuarial roles available for associates and many firms still assuming a default career path of continuing to fellowship.
There are some differences this time however:
- There will be two chartered actuary designations: Chartered Actuary (Fellow) and Chartered Actuary (Associate), with the hope that the FIAs who were most concerned with maintaining their distance from AIAs last time will now support the proposal. The original proposal suggested Chartered Actuary (CAct) would be a single distinct qualification, a required qualification point for all student actuaries to reach before going any further and globally recognised as the generalist actuarial qualification from the IFoA. This approach has been abandoned, with no requirement to complete the core curriculum before tackling specialist modules. It will be interesting to see whether Chartered Actuary (Associate) will be seen as a destination in its own right, or just a change of letters. This will depend on all of us within the profession (see below).
- The environment we are operating in has certainly changed, with the replacement of our regulator, the FRC, by the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA). One of the concerns that the IFoA were looking to address in 2018 was that another, much larger, profession, could pose an existential threat. If actuaries have a unique skill set, which is likely to be lost to a wide range of businesses and other sectors if it is unable to meet the demand for those skills due to a simple lack of numbers, then the need to take any perceived barrier to practise away from our emerging young professionals is clear. The move from FRC to ARGA does not remove this threat and there also remains in the regulatory proposals to date the threat of differential regulation, where actuaries are regulated more heavily than other professionals doing similar work could price us out of markets where we have value to add. The profession therefore needs to grow to increase our voice and influence over the future regulation of the profession.
- We have acknowledged the impact of the Great Risk Transfer within the finance sector, but in my view the impacts more generally of the increased individual risks and uncertainties millions of the UK population face as energy, food and housing costs escalate need to be faced up to by our profession. For that we need to continue to be a destination of choice for a growing number of your people with a widening range of backgrounds and experiences.
So what do we need to do to make this a change worth making? We need to start behaving like a generalist actuarial qualification is what we want, and offering roles for actuaries on completion of core practice modules in future. It will mean not necessarily insisting on further actuarial specialisation as a requirement for senior roles within our firms. It will mean getting comfortable with a much wider range of specialisms amongst those we consider to be actuaries. Some are already doing this, but most of us need to go much further. A good place to start might be the IFoA’s own website, where the Route to Becoming An Actuary still features a diagram where an IFoA Associate is shown as a milestone on the way to the final destination of becoming a Fellow.
Nothing has really changed. Associates, who are not able to hold statutory positions, are upgraded. An Associate Chartered Accountant is fully qualified and so our terminology is very misleading.
Thanks Lyndon. Of course that may be the position at the moment and for specialist roles like scheme actuary likely to remain so I imagine. However I can imagine that a strong signal that an associate is accepted as a professional destination like this will lead to other regulated roles which would be available in due course. And statutory roles are held by a very small percentage of Actuaries.
This is very bad idea as any Chartered Engineer can tell you.
Can you tell the difference between a Chartered Engineer and non- Chartered Engineer? Just as “actuary” is not a legally protected title, so is “engineer”. Adding chartered to the name does not provide any protection whatsoever.
When I become a Chartered Actuary, people will start asking me to file their tax returns and clean their data tables as I my profession will lose its elite status.
Ask yourself the question why we don’t have Chartered Barristers, Chartered Surgeons and Chartered Physicians? At least professional bodies of these professions know how to look out for their members interests by maintaining the elite nature.
Hi Douglas. Thanks for your comments, although I can’t agree with them.
The examples you give are all professions with much greater numbers and/or name recognition than the actuarial profession. There are up to 15 million engineers globally for instance. Even surgeons and barristers, whose numbers are closer to those of FIAs (ie only a factor of 3 or 4 away) are much more widely understood by the general public. So what you are suggesting, pulling up the drawbridge on those who can practise as actuaries beyond what the law requires, is, as you rightly point out, an elite position to take. It is also likely to be counter-productive, as the demand for work to be done by numerate, statistically-literate graduates comfortable working with data outstrips what can be overseen by the small band of FIAs, and the work is left to a relatively unregulated field.
I would prefer not to belong to an elite profession, but to one which embraces all of those prepared to approach the work seriously and subject to the rigorous standards we rightly demand for actuarial work (which goes way beyond the 3 exams you are laying so much importance on). That way we might actually be in a position to shape the future financial landscape rather than getting steamrollered by it.
Sorry, Nick, I’m not persuaded. The actuarial profession may well be smaller than others but that means that our clients from other professions are more numerous, right? Having looked at what other UK professions do, it is abundantly clear that the term “chartered” is far from being universally seen as top (https://www.jonactuary.com/other_professions.htm). Outside the UK, the term is virtually unknown so there’s no reason whty that should be helpful. IFoA have refused to hold a debate so I’ve organised one on Zoomat midday on Monday 05 December, which won’t be censored. So far, IFoA have not deigned to offer a member of Council to put he case for and you will be welcome (or Oliver). The booking link is at https://www.jonactuary.com/public_debate.htm, plese do come along, you will be most welcome.
Thanks for the invitation Jon. I’ll try and make it if I can.